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.

You did the best you could," and she seemed to believe I had. I said, "I've just been going through the motions," using the expression my father had after he'd watched my first tennis lesson. "Sweetie," she said, "that's what a lot of life is.

Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.

You can feel that he wants to own you - not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having. He lets you know that you already own him.

She said that her father's death had been the hardest thing in her life. "We are all children until our fathers die.

Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.

I live by Edith Whartons rule to get rid of anything neither useful nor beautiful. So I put the TV out on the street.