Melanie Thernstrom

“It was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made her cry -- school, homework, boyfriends, the future, the lack of future, the uncertainty of future, fear of future, fear in general -- but it was so hard to say exactly what the problem was in the first place.”

“He's like a lake. You assume it has great depths, pure undisturbed undiscoverable depths. You assume depths must be there because the surface is so flat--pretty and flat and utterly unrevealing. Boring almost, you might say, if you didn't know about the depths, that is, if you didn't believe they were there.”