“You know, you're too pretty for me to leave you on the couch like that," he said, pulling me toward him. I didn't know that, but I did understand then that there was no such thing as safe, only saf...”

“I want to wake Chrissie and tell her this as if it's a warning: Don't push too hard; your last chance to see a person the way you wanted them to be may come at any moment. One minute you have a par...”

“When I was very little, my mother used to say there was something of my grandmother in me, in how I tell stories the way I need them to be and not the way they actually happened.”

“She wondered sometimes if it wasn't all pretense—if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn't really wishing away the world that created w...”

“Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happyConscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.”

“Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love...”

“Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness.Listen to it carefully.”

“How do you mourn endless numbers of people in endless numbers of places? Is there a form for it, a requisite time and place for mourning? Is there ever an end to it? Can there ever be an end to it?”

“It's all rather political, mourning is.”

“And that was part of the tragedy: I had just started to know her. I was mourning the relationship that could have blossomed but didnt have a chance to grow.”