Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

I mean putting yourself out there in the way of overwhelming happiness and knowing you're also putting yourself in the way of terrible harm. I'm scared to be this happy. I'm scared to be this extreme.

She wondered if maybe tragedy was what it took to make your heart capable of admitting a new member.

It was hard to feel the right emotions at the right times. They didn’t come at all when you set a place for them, and they sacked when you weren’t ready, when you were just innocently flossing your teeth, for example, or eating a bowl of cereal.

Polly was pretty good at dieting, all right, but she was beginning to wonder whether you ever lost the parts of your self that you wanted to lose.

The most haunting thing was not that he didn't love her anymore. She could have accepted that eventually. The most haunting thing was that he did. He loved her from afar. He loved her in a way that was preserved in time, that couldn't be sullied. And she tended it in her careful, curatorial way.