People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.

She hadn't wanted to be loved carefully, only well.

... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.

She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.

She felt like a fictional character who'd escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free.

True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.

His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.