If I'd done the discovery before I wrote the book, then there would be nothing to discover. It would feel dutiful instead of exciting.

You should never read online comments if you want to keep thoughts above the belt.

You know you're screwed when a Western doctor recommends acupuncture.

A white girl disappears from a white prep school in a white suburb. Nobody knows what happened to her. The overall whiteness of the world is threatened. This must be resolved by whatever means possible.

I think the one reason that writers marry other writers - one of the reasons that I married another writer - was, I fell in love with that writer. But second of all, I had been married before and a source of marital strife was me needing to go away for a couple of weeks to write or it's Saturday and I think I just need to work today and not hang out with you.

We want to believe we couldn't be replaced, and that the people we love are irreplaceable.

Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.