“Stories are about endings,’ he’d said. ‘They don’t mean anything unless they come to an end.”

“Think of life as a story. Each one must come to an end, for it to have form and meaning. What gives life to the stories are the bodies at the end of them.”

“That’s why love stories don’t have endings! They don’t have endings because love doesn’t end.”

“How about we just be Haven and Carmine?” she suggested. “We don’t know the ending, but we can always hope for the best.”“I like that,” he said. “Besides, there’s a reason we don’t know how the story ends.”“Why?”“Because it doesn’t.”

“I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.”

“There was no end to the things that happened to sheep unless they had a shepherd who cared more about them than anything else in the world.”