The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.

I sang with my father for over 50 years, and now all of a sudden he's gone, and I just dropped out.

Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.

Loads of my friends are lesbians, and it really annoys me that gay people aren't allowed to get married in most parts of America. I'd go on a march for gay rights any time.

And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unbreakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?

He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done. I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it into his lungs.