#excerptsfromanoveliwillneverwrite

When you are a kid they let you love things for no reason. Then you grow up and they make you have a reason. They make you explain it, prove it. They kill the love with questions. They kill the kid with answers. It is a dirty trick. I am now required to have a reason for being alive, and no reason I give will ever be good enough.

"Friends" to Lovers

It's a special kind of torture to have the will to move mountains for someone, only to find the mountain is their own sorrow, and you are not allowed to touch it.

I'm sorry I can't let you stay the night. It's not that I don't want to. I'm just afraid of the light and how it falls across your face in that particular way and reminds me that I used to pray for mornings like these with someone else.

I have no desires left. I can see myself from the outside now, a woman sitting in a chair with her hands in her lap. Someone who loved me once would have wept to see how still I have become, and I do not even weep for myself anymore because weeping is also a kind of wanting.

It's a special kind of torture to have the will to move mountains for someone, only to find the mountain is their own sorrow, and you are not allowed to touch it.

A woman like me only loves the stranger while he’s still at the door. Once he enters, he’s just another man untying his shoes on my clean floor.

Love is knowing the teeth are there, and closing your eyes anyway. For who among us will lie upon their deathbed and wish they had loved less. Who will count the scars and call them mistakes . Who will look back on the teeth that closed and say I should have run — not one, not ever. For the only thing we regret, in the end, is the love we turned from. The hand we did not reach for, the fangs we did not dare.