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

I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.

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.

I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective.

the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.

I thought about how one tiny decision can change a life. A decision that takes only a split second to make.

I have always been faithful to you if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.