Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.

People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.

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.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.