Reading Claire Cooks novel is like eating some exotic dish about which you say, Wow, this is great! Whats in it? The ingredients here are: intelligence, humor, poignancy, revelation and, perhaps best of all, true originality. Ready to Fall seems to me to be ready to soar.

Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.

I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.

Now, on this road trip, my mind seemed to uncrinkle, to breathe, to present to itself a cure for a disease it had not, until now, known it had.

We are assumed to be rather hopeless - swallowed up by incorrect notions, divorced from the original genius with which we are born, lost within days of living this distracting life.

Remember me in your dreams, as I will you.

I felt myself trapped in line for a ride I was not nearly ready for, looking back but moving forward in the only direction I could go.