Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.

Being human means losing everything we love best in the world," she murmured as she released me. "But would you ask to be anything else?

I read Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," all of Shirley Jackson's books, which I loved.

Never look at other people's bad fortune,' my mother said. 'If you do, it will come back to find you instead of its rightful owner.

What men yearn for they often destroy.

He believed in dreams, in endings that people told you could never happen, in disappointments reversed and luck that lasted.

It was as though I had one map inside my head and it led to the man who was waiting for me. Someone who was alone - maybe even more alone - than I was.