In those days, I straddled more than a handful of worlds, which is also to say I belonged wholly to none.

What was justice, after all, but a particular outcome?

She was called Helen - a name, I fear, that may have gone to her head, for she frequently acted as though she had confused herself with Helen of Troy.

I had lived and left all the living I'd done in that strange, perfectly sculpted yet empty echo of my life,

It's a myth that people who live in cities are naturally more open-minded, more accepting and tolerant of difference. The truth is, whatever people are, be it saints or bigots, they simply are these things, and the city - by smashing all those different kinds of people up against one another - just makes people's tolerance (or lack of it) all that much more pronounced.

You see, doubt is a magnificently difficult pest of which to try and rid oneself and is worse than any other kind of infestation. It can creep in quietly and through the tiniest of cracks and once inside, it is almost impossible to ever completely remove.

That's the funny thing about doubt." "What do you mean?" "It makes you feel rotten as hell. But if anyone bothered to think about it, it's a symptom of love. It means it matters to you. It's the brain questioning the wisdom of the heart. It doesn't mean the heart doesn't know better all along, it only means the brain doesn't understand how.

There was something in the way he posed a question and followed it up with a generous pause, I think, that drew me out. I had never noticed all the pauses that were missing from most people's conversations.

It dawned on me that no person is as poetically homesick as someone who has come to New York for the first time and glimpsed a small vestige of her home state.

We are never the heroes of our own stories, unless we are lying. If we choose to count ourselves among the brave, we write ourselves as the villains we are, hoping for redemption.