“There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.”

“Some relationships just end. Like a star, they burn bright and brilliant, and then nothing in particular goes wrong, they just reach their end. They burn out.”

“I'm just not in a writing mood, but I keep going. What if the garbage man were not in a garbage mood? or the doctor not in a healing mood?”

“She knew that what she was going through was nothing special, just garden-variety heartbreak, the sort of thing that poets and novelists had been writing about for hundreds of years, but she also knew, from those same books, that there were people who never recover form it, ones who go on through life beset by a dim and painful longing.”

“He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.”

“There were no ordinary human beings. Everybody was born with a surprise inside.”