The phone was her worst enemy and her best friend but she never knew which until she answered it.

It was frustrating when people loved you and took an interest in you and sometimes worried about you and personally cared what you did with yourself. Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good bout yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could clip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct and had nothing at all to give." (Lena, 194)

Luck never gives; it lends.

She liked the life she had. She loved habits. She craved a day with nothing in it, a long, quiet stretch of hours in the studio.

You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.

He tricked himself into thinking that she would look into his eyes and remember, that love would conquer all.

I love the idea of fictional worlds kind of all cohering in some way.