I wonder…,” she said, “if there was such a thing as time machines, would anyone ever use them to go to the future?

When Cath's eyes closed, her eyelids stuck. She wanted to open them. She wanted to get a better look at Levi's too-dark eyebrows, she wanted to admire his crazy, vampire hairline--she had a feeling this was never going to happen again and that it might even ruin what was left of her life, so she wanted to open her eyes and bear some witness.

The idea that you're hard to love is ludicrous.

Things get better--hurt less--over time. If you let them.

And sometimes you held somebody’s hand just to prove that you were still alive, and that another human being was there to testify to that fact.

Fitting together is something you work at. It’s something you make happen—because you love each other.

I take something that happened to me in 1983, and I make it happen to somebody else in 1943. I pick my life apart that way, try to understand it better by writing straight through it.