“If I waited to feel hopeful I'd be waiting a very long time without acting. So I decouple hope from action, hope from strategy. The word that I embrace, or the concept that I return to instead, is possibility.”

“I wouldn't say I'm having postpartum depression, I would say that I'm like... having visions. Or that my true self is exploding forward.”

“The creative act is DARING. I need that— to be wholly on my knees with fiction.”

“How I could meet my sister? Where could we meet in the writing, or in silence— or in my mind?”

"It blows my mind: to go back into writing and find that now I know how to go up and out and back in language, where I couldn't figure out how to do that before." 

“I want to make a fuss with a pencil over some piece of life that has not been drawn, things that live in this between area of noticing, that are part of the background of life.”

“There are certain types of pain that are actually a sign that i have my humanity, that I’m doing something right. I’m trying not to disappear.”

“There was this anxiety about losing the past. And this idea that if I didn’t write it down, did it even happen? Would I remember it? What would that mean for me?”

“I'm interested in looking at species that don't necessarily make me feel seen but make me feel provoked.”

“The sound of the waves that had initially seemed so calming were suddenly the soundtrack to an ongoing nightmare.”

"I was aware as I was writing the book that I was still undergoing this transformation. I'm still undergoing it."

“Process wise, I move creatively much closer to the anatomy of an ocean wave, and by that I mean that the storytelling and the imaginal and the ideas and the images are inside me, kind of, gathering energy like a wave before you can see it in the ocean.”

“My whole aesthetic practice is predicated on— if something is too much, you do more of it. This absolutely ruthless pursuit of something consists in refusing to allow the question to intrude, Will anyone go along with me?”

"The narrator is unnamed, which makes a reader even more likely to think that she is in fact Sigrid.”

“WHY? Why do you have to write the same thing twice? Why does every academic article also have to be a work of fiction, and vice versa?”

"She had something like a vision: she was standing on a cliff over the ocean, and her two characters were bobbing in the water below, calling up to her that she had to jump in. She didn’t want to."

"I felt something slip away from me— disassemble. And it was that belief, that the dead can speak to us."

"There’s something in horror that, by acknowledging the evil in the world, is actually very nurturing."

“I have been obsessed and intrigued all my life with how writers think this country through.”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever had an experience of writing something that you’re very compelled to write without fully understanding it…”