We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway.

The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.

In high school, during marathon phone conversations, cheap pizza dinners and long suburban car rides, I began to fall for boys because of who they actually were, or at least who I thought they might become.

Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.

I admire the linear and decisive way a certain kind of man thinks, to my curlicue boundless overthinking.

She thought about him all the time - not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear.

She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father's clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet much, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.