I try really hard to ask people to take a look at their bookshelves. Are there female writers on it? Gay writers? Writers of color? There should be.

Why are you doing this to yourself? When something bad happens, why do you have to pick at it until it bleeds all over again?

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

You have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.

Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

I learned a lot that night. For example, that part of being the magician's assistant means coming face-to-face with illusion. That invisibility is really just knotting your body in a certain way and letting the black curtain fall over you. That people don't vanish into thin air; that when you can't find someone, it's because you've been misdirected to look elsewhere.

You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.