If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.

In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

The zipper opened all the way down our spines.

The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.