She had abruptly flipped from the southern belle and was now putting on the extremely businesslike air of those perfectionist women who'd only worked in the professional world for two or three years before stopping to have children and were now terrified of not being taken seriously.

...all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.

If everything else were still the same, he'd have felt Zee's absence like a gaping hole. But if he could continue to reconfigure his entire life, there would be no missing place where Zee had been.

The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep. ~ "The November Story

By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.

We take most everything at face value. Otherwise how could we get by?" ~ "The Museum of the Dearly Departed

History was safer than the news, because there was no question of how it would end. ~ "The Briefcase

The whole damn century would've made more sense backwards. Where we ended is worse than where we began.