The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.

A DARK MATTER is a page-turning thriller of every sort: psychological, sociological, epistemological . Plus, it's really scary.

We were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.

Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.

People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip.

No matter what terror the earth could produce - winds, seas - a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world - no flower or stone - as a single hello from a human being.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.