I have four or five ideas that just keep floating around and I want to kind of just let one – like a beautiful butterfly, let it land somewhere.
I think there is something very relatable in the idea that you hit a certain age, later in your life, where you realize you have to pick up the rug and see what’s underneath it and deal with stuff.
It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn’t so.
You drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, that was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.
The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty – we all have it.
People focus on the darker female characters in my books, but for every one of those, I can also show you an equally screwed up man that no one ever comments about, or a nicer woman that no one comments about.
The worst feeling: when you just have to wait and prepare yourself for the lie.
Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them.
Most beautiful, good things were done by women people scorn.
There’s no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.
Coffee goes great with sudden death.
I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.
My dad had limitations. That’s what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.
To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting.
Problems always start long before you really, really see them.
Safer to be feared than loved.
I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.
What an indulgence it would be, to just blow off my head, all my mean spirits disappearing with a gun blast, like blowing a seedy dandelion apart.
People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.
People love talking, and I have never been a huge talker. I carry on an inner monologue, but the words often don’t reach my lips.