The foundation of your life is luck. Hard work and talent make up the difference.

Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It's a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is. I know this well... Vanity and dishonesty may be vices, but they're also the first forms of protection I ever knew.

Whatever she saw beyond the camera lens, beyond the photographer, beyond anything in the known world probably - wasn't fit to be seen.

Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.

He wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you'd been born for only one moment and this, for whatever reason, was it.

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

Grief, he said, is carnivorous.