Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?