[Nan and Christopher, her teenage son, are visiting an aquarium.] They wandered upstairs and into a small atrium with a domed ceiling. Inside the dome, hundreds of silver anchovies swam around and around in circles, like a silver tornado.

[When I was seven, I dreamed that furniture was chasing me, particularly the large chiffarobe in the bedroom I shared with my sister. In A Seahorse Year, Nan's brother reminds her that she once ran away from home.] When she ran, it was because a dark shape was chasing her. But nothing had ever chased Christopher, she’d made sure of that.

[After Christopher goes missing, Nan ponders what his girlfriend has told her about him. I read this on a day when I was asking myself the same questions about Lynn, now twenty-one.] She wonders what else Tamara knows. She wonders what she herself has forgotten, what she overlooked, what precious bit of information she dropped on her way from work to home or left by accident at the grocery store.

[Nan's brother is described. I have known men like this. I have followed them barefoot.] Women . . . go mad for him. He’s like some potent, drifting scent, simultaneously enveloping and evanescent. Women clutch the air when he’s around, follow that scent for miles in their bare feet.

[Christopher is having a psychotic episode. He goes on the raod for the second time, this time with his girlfriend, Tamara.] It does feel better to be with him, even if they’re continuing to go nowhere. He’s a strange boy, and she loves him . . . her body has already long since sped past stop.

[Hal, Christopher's father, is experiencing the unraveling of a romantic relationship.] Their nights together these days are rare, their days together rarer still. It seems clear that they’ve reached the end of the episode, they’re simply telling the last beads now. . . .

What is love but a series of small decisions made under impossible circumstances? One by one, they add up to years.

So this is love, he remembers, this missing. This is the fullness of absence. . . this is the wealth of yearning . . . .[He is] rich with want.

Her days were also hard, as she was too weird for the other fourth graders, too plump, too spastic. She never once had a sleepover or even a best friend.
                 — Lauren Groff, “Lucky Chow Fun,” short story in Ploughshares, Fall 2006

After Long Rain,

When I walk therough the windbreak
I feel words rising from the wet ground

A sky electric with geese

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
                         — “Reluctance”
                             Robert Frost

I have decided that nostalgia is itself a kind of love. From time to time it dictates that I absolutely must have avocado and crab for lunch.
          — Georgie, the main character in The Last of Her Kind, by Sigrid Nunez

I have put on silence and waiting.
                 — Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole,” in Teaching a Stone to Talk

Some weather’s coming; you can taste on the sides of your toungue a quince tang in the air.
                 — Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
                 — Dillard in The Writing Life

August is a time of answers, a time that without nudging turns the world plain and clear.
                 — Tom Fricke,
                     “Next Year Country,” an essay about working the land in the Dakotas
                      in Doubletake, Spring 2003

How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
                 — Alfred North Whitehead

Don’t think — write.
                 — Madeleine L’Engle

Poetry is not window cleaning. It breaks the glass.
                 — Chase Twichell

A writer with a fixed idea is like a goose trying to lay a stone.
                 — Nancy Willard