Quotes from Laura Kalpakian

There are no real Californians. There are only people who live there and people who don't.

When you bite into a chocolate truffle, you don't want to find oat bran.

She spoke with the usual cadences of the young: sentences curling upward at the end, all statements fading into a smoky, implied question mark, as though nothing could be said with any reasonable certainty.

She kept the solstices and the equinoxes, both vernal and autumnal, the first of May, All Saints, all summers, kept them, but not out of reverence for the past.

Thoughts of course can't be dirty except for ignorance, untruth or ugliness. And why would you think about them anyway.

She wrote to make vivid what lay beyond her, whether in the past or the future, to make articulate that imaginative amalgam of wish and memory, to make the lost laugh once more.

With computers, e-mail, you don't hear an actual voice, but you catch a tone in the words on the screen.

The computer is a cool medium. . . . you can keep things crisp, refrigerated in a way.