When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

Times like this, when she slips her hand into mine and holds on tight, and our husband becomes just a shadow in the doorway.

I've done it all before, I tell myself, and I can do it again. Trust is the strongest weapon.

Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound.

There's a world out there that nobody has bothered to promise her.

There's a hazy smile on her lips that won't go away, and her hair is a mess. It's like a brushfire filled with casualties.

There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage--a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn't seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own.