No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.

And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he'd never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn't because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn't help it.

Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been