“What she said was always strange. It had happened long ago. It seemed insignificant. And yet it was something you remembered forever. The words as well as the story. The voice as much as the words.”

“Life is a b movie.
It's stupid and it's strange,
A directionless story,
And the dialogue is lame.
But in the he said, she said,
Sometimes there's some poetry,
If you turn your back long enough,
And let it happen naturally.”

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”

“That is a long word: forever!”

“What had it been like the first time Da tried to read the same page? She could almost see his finger under each word, the whisper of his voice as he sounded out the words to himself. How had he ever done that? It seemed impossible.”

“I wondered if she was trying to convey something to me, something she could not put into words - something prior to words that she could not grasp within herself and which therefore had no hope of ever turning into words.”

“Always remember the last words of my grandfather, who said: "A truck!"”

“What does it say?" I said, when I had. She said, "It is filled with all the words for how I want you… Look.”

“Reality is ungraspable. For convenience we use a limited-reality consensus in which work can be done, transport arranged, and essential services provided. The real reality is something else—only the strangeness of it can be taken in and that's what interests me: the strangeness of human consciousness; the strangeness of life and death; the strangeness of what the living and the dead are to one another; and the strangeness of ideas … that seem to have been with us from long before the stories of them happened. The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can't be put into words; the most that a writer can do—and this is only rarely achieved—is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.”

“You can’t undo something that’s happened; you can’t take back a word that’s already been said out loud.”