The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

When you’re given an opportunity to change your life, be ready to do whatever it takes to make it happen. The world doesn’t give things, you take things. If you learn one thing from me, it should probably be that.”

People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth.

When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is “You’re safe with me”—that’s intimacy.

Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.

It’s always been fascinating to me how things can be simultaneously true and false, how people can be good and bad all in one, how someone can love you in a way that is beautifully selfless while serving themselves ruthlessly.

Which is about the cruelest thing you can do to someone you love, give them just enough good to make them stick through a hell of a lot of bad.

I wasn’t heartbroken when Don left me. I simply felt like my marriage had failed. And those are very different things.

No one is just a victim or a victor. Everyone is somewhere in between. People who go around casting themselves as one or the other are not only kidding themselves, but they’re also painfully unoriginal.”