What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.

Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through.

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?

Honey, Kate is not going to die sooner because you have one more glass of mine, or because you stay overnight in a hotel, or because you let yourself crack up at a bad joke. So sit your ass back down and turn up the volume and act like you're a normal person.

I've always sort of wondered: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?

His hand is cool on my cheek as he paints a tear beneath my left eye, dark blue and swollen with sorrow.

Maybe if you spend your life pretending you're on a movie set, you don't ever have to admit that the walls are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren't really yours.