“That's the fundamental flaw in the illusion that writers like to maintain, the idea that we can craft anything approaching the truth. No matter how richly we imagine, no matter how vividly we set the scene, we never come close to the unambiguous realness of the moment itself.”

“Sometimes I wonder how we can be so sure what it is God sees. How arrogant we are, I sometimes think, to imagine there's someone watching us every minute. To think our every action matters that much.”

“How can it be, I wondered, that we can be lying in bed next to a person we love wholly and helplessly, a person we love more than our own breath, and still ache to think of the one who caused us pain all those years ago? It's the betrayal of this second heart of ours, its flesh tied off like a fingertip twined tightly round with a single hair, blue-tinged from lack of blood. The shameful squeeze of it.”

“It is not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart is dark color: it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.”

“It's not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.”

“It's not the content of out dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.”

“We never know, do we, what our neighbors might be doing behind their fences, what love affairs and bloody rituals might be taking place right next door? The world is a more interesting place that we ever think.”