“What's difficult to understand about German opera? It's always the same. Boy meets girl, boy falls in love, girl gets devoured by horrible winged creature with claws.”

“The time for falling in love was when you were emotionally available and free of cares, when it didn’t matter what time you came home or how late you were getting up the next day. When you had hours and hours to spend gazing into each other’s eyes and even longer hours making love, uninterrupted. If you wait for the perfect time to fall in love…it’ll never happen.”

“You have seven writers in your basement?”Donald nods, signing, “They like it here. There’s a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer . . . . They don’t usually make much trouble.”

“She reflects on the girl she had been in this place, and the things she had to do in order to survive. For a long time, she’d had to live her child- hood backward, forced to step up and take charge of things that were thrust into her hands.”

“Here's the thing about broken hearts. You can always survive them. Always. No matter how deep the hurt, the capacity to heal and move on is even stronger.”

“Everybody's in love when they're eighteen. And everybody gets dumped.”

“Fear and love were sometimes the same thing both necessary unavoidable. Now she understood that it was okay to bleed if you know how to heal.”