For some reason our lives were marked by summers. . . . Summer was the time when our lives joined completely, when we all had our birthdays, when really important things happened

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's had a lot of chances to care, and he hasn't.

She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.

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

Women always seemed to bring the size they wished they were to the fitting room, rather than the size that would actually fit.

This body is breaking down, but I am not.