There are moments in your life when you know that the sentence that will come next will change your life forever, although you realize, even as you are anticipating this sentence, that your life has...

Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love – soaked, drenched in love – only to discover later that perhaps you didn’t know that person...

The view, though. The view. It is undeniably exhilarating.

And this all causes her to wonder at the disparity between the silk dresses and the natural postures of the body, and to think: How far, HOW FAR, we are willing to go to pretend...

Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.

That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.

The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that...

Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know...

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel...

Later, when she sees the photographs for the first time, she will be surprised at how calm her face looks – how steady her gaze, how erect her posture. In the picture her eyes will...

A person walks into a room and says hello, and your life takes a course for which you are not prepared. It’s a tiny moment (almost-but not quite-unremarkable), the beginning of a hundred thousand tiny...

Sydney discovers that she minds the loss of her mourning. When she grieved, she felt herself to be intimately connected to Daniel. But with each passing day, he floats away from her. When she thinks...

Olympia thinks often about desire – desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence – and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve...

To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.

Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.

And she thought then how strange it was that disaster–the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in...

The things that don’t happen to us that we’ll never know didn’t happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer...