Others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better

But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.

One thing's sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children

A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world

You got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, things got narrow real quick.