I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.

What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

It was the combination of many factors... With most people, suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.

The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.

But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.