To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

It's so much easier to have no expectations than to have big ones.

Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.

She spilled rice on my knee, and she smiled. I wanted her to spill a thousand things on me, lava, acid, bricks, anything, and smile each time

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

He didn't seem to realize that three excuses was as good as no excuse.

She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.