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

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.

Love and marriage are wonderful arenas in which to place a character. We are most likely to risk our morals and beliefs while in love. Betrayal gives tremendous insights into a character as well.

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

Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you.

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.