Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer - that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you'd left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn't love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.

I really wanted to be a musician, but it turned out I had no sense of time.

Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.

It's like the human race has been programmed for misery.

He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.

My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them.

I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.