When someone loves you up one side and down the other like that, you make every effort to stick around.

But it was like wearing a size five sneakers when your foot is a seven- you can get by for a few steps, and then you set down and pull off the shoes because it just plain much

She stares at me for a moment, and then she bursts out laughing. “You haven’t seen his perfect little wife and his perfect little girls. Believe me, Oliver, I’m not the great love of his life, the one he’ll never forget.” “You are to me,” I say.

It's never the differences between people that suprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common.

I start by mulling a question and before I know it, a whole drama is unfolding in my head. Often, an idea sticks before I know what I'm going to do with it.

It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

[I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.