“I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.”

“I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.”

“You broke up with him," a combination Effie-Carmen voice in her head reminded her."But that didn't mean you were allowed to stop loving me," she felt like saying to him.”

“It’s more that I’m afraid of time. And not having enough of it. Time to figure out who I’m supposed to be… to find my place in the world before I have to leave it. I’m afraid of what I’ll miss.”

“Or was he the romantic fiction of a girl who'd been desperate for a handsome stranger to come along?”

“I felt as though thepast and the future, cause and effect, patterns and connections, were a huge complicated artifice, and it was only by my efforts that they kept going.If I gave up it would all dissolve into the raw chaos of the senses. That’s all we really have. The rest is romanticism and storytelling. But we needthose stories. I guess I do.”

“I'm writing this down, because it is going to be hard for me to say it. Because this is probably our last time just us. See, I can write that down, but I don't think I can say it. I'm not doing this to say goodbye, though I know that has to be part of it. I'm doing it to thank you for all we have had and done and been for one another, to say I love you for making this life of mine what it is. Leaving you is the hardest thing I have to do. But the thing is, the best parts of me are in you, all three of you. You are who I am, and what I cherish in myself stays on in you.”