The city of Pittsburgh gleaming suddenly before her . . . so startling in its vastness and its beauty that she had gasped and slowed, afraid of losing control of the car

You can't spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won't work. You'll just end up missing the life you have.

...so young, so lonely and naive, that she imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time and its only renewal came from giving it away.

But she had felt since childhod that her life would n ot be ordinary. A moment would come- she would know it when she saw it- and everything would change.

She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.

It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.

Its impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.