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He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

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A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

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A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders...more

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That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

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You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

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Stories can save us.

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Stories are for joining the past to the future.

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Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.

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In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own...more

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What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

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…he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin all at once. He wanted to k...more

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What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I ...more

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Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.