The bottom line is that we never fall for the people we're supposed to.

Do you know how, when you are on the verge of a breakdown, the world pounds in your ears; a rush of blood, of consequence? Do you now how it feels when the truth cuts your tongue to ribbons, and still you have to speak it?

Not everyone understands how you can spin two lassos at the same time, one of hope and one of grief.

I imagine the touch of someone who loves you so much, he cannot bear to watch you sleep; and so you wake up with his hand on your heart.

When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.

Where did you go?" "To the end of the driveway," my mother says. "I was nine months pregnant; that was the maximum distance I could waddle without feeling as if my uterus was falling out." I wince. "Do you have to be quite so graphic?" "What would you like me to call it, Zoe? A fetal living room?

Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer.