She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.

Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

He'd never had to make the adjustments and compromises other people accepted early in their romantic careers; never had a chance to learn the lesson that Sarah taught him everyday--that beauty was only a part of it, and not even the most important part, that there were transactions between people that occurred on some mysterious level beneath the skin, or maybe even beyond the body.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

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