It's a funny thing, hope. It's not like love, or fear, or hate. It's a feeling you don't really know you had until it's gone. - Anna Quindlen

I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as they're not too terrible — well, even perhaps the truly terrible ones — and will reread something she's already read, even if it's something like a detective novel, when you'd suspect that knowing who had really killed the countess would materially detract from the experience. (It doesn't, and besides, I often can't remember who the murderer was in the first place.)

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

After my mother died, I had a feeling that was not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.