The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.

Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.

In a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips has written the novel of the year. It's the story of a serial killer's crimes and capture, yes, but it's also a compulsively readable story of how one brave woman faces up to acts of terrible violence in order to create something good and strong in the aftermath. Quiet Dell will be compared to In Cold Blood, but Phillips offers something Capote could not: a heroine who lights up the dark places and gives us hope in our humanity.

That's the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the most inopportune moments.

A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

The shining. It was a good name, a comforting name, because she had always thought of it as a dark thing.