“This was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel.”

“I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant.”

“I loved him for a full year and then, in one night, all my wishing came apart.”

“I'd had my share of rain. My mother's illness ... had weighed on me, but the years before had been heavy, too. I was only twenty eight.”

“Knowing he was suffering pained me. That’s the way love tangles you up. I couldn’t stop loving him, and couldn’t shut off the feelings of wanting to care for him— but I also didn’t have to run to answer his letters. I was hurting, too, and no one was running to me.”

“At twenty-eight I'd had a handful of beaux, but had only been in love once, and that had been awful enough to make me doubt men and myself for a good long while.”

“I wanted something grand and sweeping.""The kind of love you find in novels?""Maybe. That makes me incredibly stupid, I suppose.”