I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.

Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.