Quotes from Sara Gran

The fat lady never really sings her last song. She only changes costumes and goes on to the next

Is the thing we love always our downfall? Always our destruction?

There are no coincidences, Silette wrote. Only mysteries that haven't been solved, clues that haven't been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overheard, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don't see the omens. They don't know how to read the signs. To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries.

If you consider yourself a writer just write.

We all want to be someone else. And sometimes we succeed in convincing ourselves we can be. But it doesn't last, and our own true selves, broken and scarred, always win out in the end.

The law was for people who needed instructions, she would later tell me. The same people who needed to be told not to put a baby in the dryer or a dog in the microwave.

The thing about this city," Andray said. "It knows how to tell a beautiful story. It truly does. But if you're looking for a happy ending, you better be lookin' somewhere else.

He realized that you can try as hard as you want to escape who you are, but eventually, you realize there is no escape. There's nowhere to run, and nothing to run to. Nothing ever really changes. The state of life on earth is exactly what it is, and the only chance of a happy life is accepting that. Accepting life as it is. And knowing that there is no escape. And that's the only freedom he's ever been able to find.

But I knew I was there for a reason. There are no coincidences. Just opportunities you've been too dumb to take, doors you've been too blind to step through.

To let go of the self is the highest calling of the self, something that few achieve. And something that every self, whether she knows it or not, aspires

The teller has no responsibility to make the listener believe in the truth. Each must take the words and make them their own. No one can do this for another.

Mysteries never end," Silette wrote. "And we solve them anyway, knowing we are both solving both everything and nothing. We solve them knowing the world will surely be as poorly or even worse off than before. But this is the piece of life we have been given authority over, nothing else; and while we may ask why over and over, no one yet has been given an answer.

Later, as life wore on, I would realize that most people think everyone hates them. The truth is worse; for most people, no one is thinking of them at all.

People had let us down. People had broken our hearts. We liked books and animals and messy rooms full of things that weren't people.

Sometimes the past comes up on us like a ghost. Sometimes life is like a haunted house. But there's no way to leave. You just have to make your peace with the ghosts.

I had thousands of books in my house and never found anything I wanted to read. I would stare at the shelves of books like a hungry person staring into an open refrigerator and wait for something to speak to me. But nothing ever spoke.

Happiness," Silette wrote, "is the temporary result of denying the knowledge one already has.

Most people wouldn't know the truth if it bit them in the ass and paid for the privilege.

There are no coincidences. Only doors you didn't have the courage to walk through. only blind spots you weren't brave enough to see. Only tones you refused to admit you could hear.

It works. But the tricky thing is, it never works exactly how you expect. People think they're smart enough to summon up some entity or make someone fall in love with them and have it all turn out for the best. But they aren't smart enough. Whatever it is that usually decides our fates--Gods, luck, random chance--it's smarter than us. It's always smarter. Magic works, but it's an exercise in irony, sometimes a dangerous one. Be careful.

Much of my life was a dreary grind in which I was responsible for everything, always. For someone else to take that responsibility, even for a few minutes, was pure pleasure.

We weren't monogamous out of obligation. We were monogamous because we wanted each other more than anyone else. We were monogamous because no one else could compare.

Sometimes doing things was easier than talking about things. Doing revealed less; talking exposed more, including the parts that could get hurt.

He leaned over and kissed me — not for the first time, but it still felt like something. Like something I don't remember having felt before, or at least for a long time. Like a door had been opened that had been shut so long ago that I forgot it was there, and whatever was behind that door was younger and brighter and less burdened than what I'd becom