For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

Maybe everything really does just have an expiration date--one that you can't see until she tells you she's leaving, and then she's gone.

There is a perfect someone, even if the road to that someone isn’t all that perfect.

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

It was a completely new feeling for me–like someone had just released a million, tiny butterflies loose in my stomach, and they were feverishly flying up into my head and making me lose my mind.

Perfect love was that kind of love that made no sense but made everything else make sense somehow. It was raw and unscripted, turbulent and slightly unpredictable.

Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.