Olive Kitteridge' is a masterpiece: The writing is so perfect you don't even notice it; the story is so vivid it's less like reading a story than experiencing it firsthand.

I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.

It's perfectly natural to doubt your judgment about doubting your judgment.

It scares me. But then I get this big feeling, simple but exalted: He's like me, just with different details.

Everywhere you go, you see women more beautiful than yourself. You imagine him being attracted to them. You're drinking gasoline to stay warm.

Basically, all anyone has to do is ask me for fun details or tell me to be creative, and my mind turns to mud. I am instantly the most boring person you've ever met.

You have to shrink yourself to fit into this little life with him.

I feel in some ways I've had a difficult life. And it makes me the kind of writer I am, in what I value, what I respect, what I hold dear.

The only relationships I haven't wrecked right away were the ones that wrecked me later.

She seems sort of lost.' I thought, Lost how? How am I lost? Suddenly I felt lost.

I hate weddings,' she says. 'They make me feel so unmarried. Actually, even brushing my teeth makes me feel unmarried.

So tell me, Tamara darlin', what other needs can I help you take care of?

I need nothing. I seek nothing. I desire nothing.

They may attack me with an army of six hundred syllogisms; and if I do not recant, they will proclaim me a heretic.

Do not do anything that anyone else can do readily.

The great risk is always saying, "how will I communicate what I'm trying to get across to a room full of strangers sitting in the dark watching a stage?"

There should be more women directing; I think there's just not the awareness that it's really possible.

It is godlike to unloose the spirit, and forget yourself in thought.

I have no formal training as a writer at all, not even a single English class in college.

No, it happened. And right when your song ended, I knew - just like your mother - I was a goner,' Peeta says.

A dependent clause is like a dependent child: incapable of standing on its own but able to cause a lot of trouble.