Don't call me Alessandro, or this could get ugly. Oh, then may I call you Alice?

Absorbing the fact that sometimes, people do cut you slack and forgive you and want you anyway. Sometimes they do. And when they do, even if it's not a happy ending, it is delicious

Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.

We shouldn't piss them off, explained Frankie, because who knows what they'll do now that they've united.

These guys, they were so sure of their places in life--so deeply confident of their merit and their future--they didn't need any kind of front at all.

I hate those endless descriptions of a heroine's physical attributes . . . it really bothers me how in books it seems like the only two choices are perfection or self-hatred. As if readers will only like a character who's ideal--or completely shattered.

I looked at her. my lovely, tall mother with her pretty coil of hair and her hard, bitter mouth. Her veins were never open. Her heart never leapt out to flop helplessly on the lawn. She never melted into puddles. She was normal. Always. At any cost.