Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number.

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a bady's beshattered diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

What a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are).

It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.

Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.