Everywhere you go, you see women more beautiful than yourself. You imagine him being attracted to them. You're drinking gasoline to stay warm.

I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.

It might sound ordinary for a woman to find out her husband's cheating on her, but not if you're the woman and it's your husband.

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.

He gives me a kiss that barely touches my lips – it means nothing or everything. After he’s gone, I think, Happy birthday to me. Jack says, ‘That was the guy?’ ‘That was him.’ Jake shakes his head. ‘What?’ ‘He’s not for you,’ he says. I say, ‘How do you know?’ but what I mean is, How do you know? ‘He’s like Ashley Wilkes,’ he says. ‘Any one of these guys is Rhett-ier than he is.’ Again, I ask my benignly inflected, ‘How do you know?’ ‘How do I know?’ he says, tackling me into a bear hug. ‘How do I know? I know, that’s how I know.

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.

We are all children until our fathers die.