“You can run but you can't hide... but I can try. I feel air catch in my lungs and I get a cramp in my side and this pain, this wonderful physical pain that I can place, reminds me that after all I am still alive. ”

“There is a place in you that you don't even know exists, where you can simply stand back and watch without feeling any pain.”

“You know how I get angry sometimes? That's because it's the only way I can still feel. And I need to test myself, to make sure I'm really here.”

“Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.”

“On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive - the sum of the parts equal more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.”

“Personally, I like books that make you think – books you’re still wondering about three days after you finish them; books you hand to a friend and say “Read this, so we can talk about it”. I suppose I’m just writing the kind of novel I like to read”

“It made me think of my mother, when she made her pie crusts. She'd prick little holes all over the place. So it can breath, she said. I was just breathing. I closed my eyes, anticipating each cut, feeling that wash of relief when it was done.”