The past can be escaped only by embracing something better.

They continued to watch each other from across the room, both frozen for a moment by the shadow of distant possibilities.

She liked to sit on the front porch in the afternoons and read books she'd checked out from the library. Aside from coffee, reading was her only indulgence.

When I was seventeen, my life changed forever . . .

In this world that we live in we have originality in literature, but we also have TV and movies. I write love stories. I could never write a love story based on the Titanic - that was never a novel. If I see an idea that's been done in film, I try to avoid that.

You're still alive. And that means you'll love and be loved...and in the end, nothing else really matters.

I never know what to tell them. I mean, there's nothing you can say to make a person stop hurting. Half the time, I just feel like telling them the truth. I'd say that for 3 months, you're going to feel worse than you've ever felt and you cope as best you can. And that after 6 months, the pain isn't so bad, but it still hurts more than you think it will. And even after years, you still find yourself thinking about the person you lost and get sad about it. And you still miss them all the time.