Knowledge was power, but a good librarian did not hoard the gift. She taught others how to find, where to look, how to see.

The first time someone I loved left me behind...I didn't know how my family would balance. We had been such a sturdy little end table, four solid legs. I was sure we would now be off-kilter, always unstable. Until one day I looked more closely, and realized that we had simply become a stool.

Jacob's room is the place entropy goes to die.

Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets,lies,stories. We all tell them. Sometimes,because we hope to entertain. Sometimes,because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to.

It is so easy to presume that while your own world has ground to an absolute halt, so has everyone else's.

You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.

for 100,000 (dollars), you [can] flatten a house with a wrecking ball. Imagine how much less it [takes] to destroy something than it [does] to build it in the first place.