And none of these people, not one of them, had loved any of the others well enough. Failures, he thought, we're all failures... He wanted his love to be the wine and bread, and the blood and flesh. He reached for her, a dangerous stranger in a city of dangerous strangers, but she turned away from him and walked unsteadily through the crowd. How many loveless people walk among the barely loved?

In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do.

And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her. And a little scared. Well, a lot scared.

You have to love somebody that much to also hate them that much, too. (191)

Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.

If you're good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can't be wrong.

But we danced, under wigs and between unfinished walls, through broken promises and around empty cupboards.