She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.

One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.

Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.

Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.