“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”

“We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth”

“When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.”

“Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?”

“At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.”

“But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vul...”

“The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a si...”

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”