Reunions are always fraught with awkward tensions - the necessity to account for oneself; the attempt to find, through memories, an ember of the old emotions.

Love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.

To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game.

Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.

There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words.

Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.

If you're skating on thin ice, you might as well dance.

I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective.

Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you.

To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

In short, immaturity is spoiled. And what is spoiled doesn’t ripen. It goes bad early, gets bitter and withers on the vine.

I have a deep and profound mistrust of all politicians.

A self-defined challenge is an irresistible teacher.

When a man is shooting a handgun, it's just like he is shooting because that's his job, and he has no other choice. It's no good. When a girl is shooting a handgun, it's really something.

Compassion can never coexist with judgement because judgement creates the distance, the distinction, which prevents us from really being with the other.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others.

I've never gotten hired for drama because I'm a good improviser. I don't think people who write drama scripts want you playing with them as much.

I don't think there's anywhere to draw the line sexually.

Sadly, some folks want others to feel their pain, to hurt as much as they do-or more. My grandmother once told me to avoid colds and angry people whenever I could. It's sound advice.