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

Odd how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love-soaked, drenched in love-only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined.

love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.

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.

Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.

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

I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?