No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written

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.

You cannot dispute the ridiculous. You cannot argue reasonably with evil.

My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.

Love ambushed you, it lay in wait, dormant for days or years. It was the red thread, the peach stone, the kiss, the forgiveness. It came after you, it escaped you, it was invisible, it was everything.

My mother, Abra, had taught me that all people are made from the same dust. When our days here are gone, all men and women enter the same garden.

Still, she knows one thing for certain: never judge a relationship unless you are the one wrapped up in its arms.