Up until that moment, I'd been at the earliest stage of love, when you feel it will turn you into the better person you want to be. Now, his gentle voice and sage advice took me to a later stage: I felt I needed to pretend to be a better person than I was so he'd keep loving me. This was hard because it made me hate him.

Nice,' I say, realizing only afterward that I've mimicked her, a bad habit of mine; I'm like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive.

Olive Kitteridge' is a masterpiece: The writing is so perfect you don't even notice it; the story is so vivid it's less like reading a story than experiencing it firsthand.

I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.

I tried to avoid Mimi. Her presence seemed to call forth every rejection I'd ever experienced-the teachers who'd looked at me as though I held no promise, the boys who didn't like me back. Around her, I became fourteen again.

The only relationships I haven't wrecked right away were the ones that wrecked me later.

You don't need a reason to forgive... If you want to go on with someone, that is what you do.