When I read Jerome D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" that was the first time I felt my mind blow open. I thought that book was speaking to me. I was 12 or 13 when I read that. I read everything on my mother's bookshelves.

Here's the thing about luck...you don't know if it's good or bad until you have some perspective.

The sky is already purple; the first few stars have appeared, suddenly, as if someone had thrown a handful of silver across the edge of the world.

That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.

Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories.

Jill told me that when you're really in love, you know right away. I'm not exactly sure how this happens. Is it like a flash of lightning? Like an angel tapping you on the shoulder? Or is it similar to choosing a puppy? You think you're picking the cutest one, but really you wind up going home with the one who keeps insisting on climbing into your lap.

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