One of the blessings human beings take for granted is the ability to remember pain without re-feeling it. The pain of the physical wounds is long gone …and the other kind of hurt, the damage done to our spirits, has been healed. We are careful with those scarred places in each other.

Where's your instruction manual?" I asked him. "What's the baby customer-service number?

Baptists don’t spend their time thinking about reality.

Mysteries of attraction could not always be explained through logic. Sometimes the fractures in two separate souls became the very hinges that held them together.

It was a train wreck happening right in front of me and I couldn't do anything about it, except that not only was I watching, I was also the train.

And you're not the kind of girl I want." Surely he couldn't mean the fact that I was Mexican. From what I knew of Hardy, there wasn't a bit of prejudice in him. He never used racist words, never looked down on someone for things they couldn't help. "What kind do you want?" I asked with difficulty. "Someone I can leave without looking back.

I always counsel aspiring novelists that passion is the most important quality for a writer to possess - technique can be taught, but that relentless desire to write has to come from within.