In the time it takes for her to walk from the bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune's Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire.

And so a person can never promise to love someone forever because you never know what might come up, what terrible thing the person you love might do.

I guess that's the point of drinking, to take all the feelings and thoughts and morals away until you are just a body doing what a body will do.

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

Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to forever alter an individual's compass. And it is the knowing that such a thing can so easily happen, as you did not know before, not really, that has fundamentally changed you and your son.

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