So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

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 perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

My goal in life is to become an adjective.