And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

Olympia thinks often about desire - desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence - and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul.

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go.

That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to forever alter an individual's compass. And it is the knowing that such a thing can so easily happen, as you did not know before, not really, that has fundamentally changed you and your son.

Love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.

To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.