“Off and on for many years, I tried to write a book about my childhood. I’d bring chapters to workshop, to writing group, and I always got the same comments: How could you live this way? How could you survive this? It’s too raw. You don’t speak to these people, do you? I was deeply hurt by these reactions, and also confused. This was my mother. I loved her. This was my family. My life. How could it be too raw?”

“It’s a known fact that in life, you can’t have everything. In my heart I knew I loved them both, as much as possible to love two people at the same time. Conrad and I were linked, we would always be linked. That wasn’t something I could do away with. I knew that now—that love wasn’t something you could erase, no matter how hard you tried.”

“But Jude,' she would say, 'you knew me. All those days and years, Jude, you knew me. My ways and my hands and how my stomach folded and how we tried to get Mickey to nurse and how about that time when the landlord said...but you said...and I cried, Jude. You knew me and had listened to the things I said in the night, and heard me in the bathroom and laughed at my raggedy girdle and I laughed too because I knew you too, Jude. So how could you leave me when you knew me?”

“I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.”

“I could write stories; I could hide from the world and make my own instead of trying to change it or live in it. I could make paper people and I would love them too; I could make them almost real.”

“Seth: "I write of love in my novels, write of it well, if my critics and fans are to be believed, but in all of my years at that typewriter, I never found the combination of words that would convey how I felt about you. You were my everything.”