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

Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.

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

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

Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.

But how do you ever know that you know a person?