In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.

We are only an instant, that's true. But we are eternal.

That is how you know you've left childhood behind-when you wish for time to go backward.

He fell in love with the way she closed her eyes, long before he fell in love with her.

Among men and women, those in love do not always announce themselves with declarations and vows. But they are the ones who weep when you're gone. Who miss you every single night, especially when the sky is so deep and beautiful, and the ground so very cold.

If we had paid attention, we would have understood there are some things in this world you cannot outrun.

Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" was extremely important to me.