To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game.

Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.

And she thought then how strange it was that disaster--the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face--could be at times, such a thing of beauty.

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

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

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

To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.