"Why do we weep in grief,' the aunt wondered. 'Dogs, deer, birds sufferent with dry eyes and in silence. The dumb suffering of animals. Probably a survival technique."

"Quoyle with regards to Petal, his wife, "There was a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering...In another time, in another sex, she would have been Genghis Khan."

"That was the stuff of other lives, he was waiting for his to begin. He got in the habit of walking around the trailer and asking aloud, "Who knows?" He said, "Who knows?" For no one knew. He meant, anything could happen. A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction."

"Quoyle, who spoke little himself, inspired talkers. His only skill in the game of life"

"Quoyle large, white, stumbling along going nowhere"

"All stemmed from Quoyle's chief failure, a failure of normal appearance."

"In a knot of eight crossings, which is about the average-size knot, there are 256 different 'over-and-under' arrangements possible... Make only one change in this 'over and under' sequence and either an entirely different knot is made or no knot at all may result."

"The future flickered before him as a likely series of disappointments."

"That world he wanted them to know had vanished as smoke deserts the dying embers that made it."

"Deiter felt himself too old, lost in the forest of his own experience."

"As he cut, the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered as each tree fell and one by one the web strands snapped."

"In every life there are events that reshape one's sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed."

"“I have never fallen in love with one of my characters. The notion is repugnant. Characters are made to carry a particular story; that is their work. The only reason one shapes a character to look as he or she does, behave and speak in a certain way, suffer particular events, is to move the story forward in a particular direction. I do not indulge characters nor give them their heads and “see where they go,” and I don’t understand writers who drift downriver in company with unformed characters…”"

"“This has always bothered me, the division: as though there was something about women who write that is very different.”"

"“I don’t think I was a particularly good or diligent mother. It took a long time for the obvious to become obvious: I could not operate in a conventional family.”"

"“It’s kind of an old-fashioned book…It’s long; it has a lot of characters; it takes a big theme. It isn’t a navel-staring, dysfunctional-family thing that’s so beloved of most American writers. It’s different, but I think people probably miss those books that were written some time ago – the big book that was written with care.”"

"“Where a story begins in the mind I am not sure—a memory of haystacks, maybe, or wheel ruts in the ruined stone, the ironies that fall out of the friction between past and present, some casual phrase overheard. But something kicks in, some powerful juxtaposition, and the whole book shapes itself up in the mind…”"

"“The construction of short stories calls for a markedly different set of mind than work on a novel, and for me short stories are at once more interesting and more difficult to write than longer work. The comparative brevity of the story dictates more economical and accurate use of words and images, a limited palette of events, fewer characters, tighter dialogue, strong title and punctuation that works to move the story forward. If the writer is trying to illustrate a particular period or place, a collection of short stories is a good way to take the reader inside a house of windows, each opening onto different but related views—a kind of flip book of place, time and manners.”"

"“Place and history are central to the fiction I write, both in the broad, general sense and in detailed particulars. Rural North America, regional cultures in critical economic flux, the images of an ideal and seemingly attainable world the characters cherish in their long views despite the rigid and difficult circumstances of their place and time. Those things interest me and are what I write about. I watch for the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them.”"

"“I loathe interviews and getting me to sit still for a whole day is unprecedented.”"

"Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is without question the book that made me want to try to be a fiction writer as an actual serious undertaking."

": —Neither does anybody else. Sometimes you get a clear sense that doing math is largely just feeding data into the substation and waiting to see what comes out. I’m not even sure that it’s all that wise to commit things to memory."

": —I’m not sure I see how that would work."

"How do you know you shouldnt? The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesnt go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonderwhy the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it? We dont know. I’ve posed the question to some pretty good"

": —I’ve no idea. It strikes me as extremely unlikely. But again the probability is not zero."

": —Do you?"

": —I dont believe in this one."

"Do you believe in an afterlife?"

"A group of evil and aberrant and wholly malicious partial differential equations who had conspired to usurp their own reality from the questionable circuitry of the creator’s brain not unlike the rebellion which Milton describes and to fly their colors as an independent nation unaccountable to God or man alike."

"I thought about David Bohm. He wrote a really good book on quantum mechanics — largely because Einstein had half convinced him that the theory was faulty. He wanted to get down his thoughts on paper. By the time he'd finished the book he didn't believe in the theory."

"As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared."

"If the world has a mind then it's all worse than we thought."

"Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music."

"My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow."

"You shouldn't worry about what people think of you because they don't do it that often."

"The days are long but the years are short."

"If mathematical objects exist independently of human thought what else are they independent of? The universe, I suppose."

"Your life is set upon you like a dog."

"The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation."

"Those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished."

"Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief."

": —Russell said so."

": —Is it true?"

"When Wittgenstein convinced Russell that all math is a tautology, Russell gave up on math."

"The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy."

": - I dont know what that means. Physics tries to draw a numerical picture of the world. I dont know that it actually explains anything. You cant illustrate the unknown. Whatever that might mean."

"Do you really believe in physics?"

"Finally he leaned and cupped his hand to the glass chimney and blew out the lamp and lay back in the dark. He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue."

"He climbed into the loft and sat at the tower window wrapped in his blanket. Spits of rain on the sill. Summer lightning far out to sea. Like the flare of distant fieldpieces. The patter on the tarp he’d stretched over his bed. He turned up the wick of the lamp at his elbow and took the notebook from its box and opened it. Then he stopped. He sat for a long time. In the end, she had said, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgment of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other. The only alternate is the surprise in those antic shapes burned into the concrete. The ages of men stretching grave to grave. An accounting on a slate. Blood, darkness. The washing of dead children on a board. The stone laminations of the world with their fossil prints unreckonable in form and number. My father’s latterday petroglyphs and the people upon the road naked and howling. The storm passed and the dark sea lay cold and heavy. In the cool metallic waters the hammered shapes of great fishes. The reflection in the swells of a molten bolide trundling across the firmament like a burning train. He bent over his grammar in the light of the oil lamp. The straw roof hissing in the bellshaped dark above him and his shadow on the roughtroweled wall. Like those scholars of old in their cold stone rooms toiling at their scrolls. The lenses of their lamps that were made of tortoiseshell boiled and scraped and formed in a press and the fortuitous geographies they cast upon the tower walls of lands unknown alike to men or to their gods."