Monica Hesse

“By the end of his life, one has a far easier time picturing Hugh Hefner buying his girlfriend a comfy pair of slippers than one of the satin corsets the Bunnies used to wear.”

“My heart will still ache sometimes. Maybe more often than not. I think it's possible to be healed without feeling whole.”

“I hope people will never stop dressing up as Harry Potter. It feels less to me like something you wear because you think it's a great costume idea and more like something you wear because you really like wearing your Hogwarts robe, and you really only get the one chance per year.”

“Cooking is a weird thing. In homes, I'd wager it's still women who do more of the cooking.”

“When Holly Madison, Hef's former chief girlfriend, came out with a tell-all book about life in the Mansion, the most bizarre revelation was that, prior to the man's infamous orgies, all of the live-in girlfriends were required to put on matching pink flannel pajamas.”

“It's part of the American experience: We deal with mosquitoes in August, airport delays around Thanksgiving, expensive health care and the potential of being shot, at any time, by a semiautomatic weapon as we try to go about the most boring, precious, asinine aspects of our daily lives.”

“Fiction writing and journalism, in my experience, are really excellent training grounds for each other.”

“Then you know. You know what it's like to love someone like you love yourself and lose them.”

“Long before the writer Gillian Flynn popularized the concept of the insufferable 'Cool Girl,' who doesn't exist except in men's fervent fantasies, Hugh Hefner dreamed her, undressed her, and put her in his magazine.”

“Like a lot of people, I read 'The Diary of Anne Frank' again and again and again when I was growing up - I'm still completely felled by what an astounding book it is. And as a teenager, I did a lot of reading about concentration camps and the vast horrors of the war.”

“I can bend my wrist down to my forearm. I can wrench my fingers backward until they rest on my hand. A hitchhiker's thumb might arc into a 90-degree angle; mine will go to 135.”

“Tow best friends meeting on the street to say so many things at once: I betrayed you, I love you, I want to save you, I'm sorry. All around Europe, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And here, in my city, the Nazis slaughtered a family because of events that started with love and jealousy and a slip of the tongue.”

“But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.”

“Genes are mysterious things, still unpredictable after all of our research, flecks of humanity that can destroy lives but, just as often, can teach us to appreciate the strange wonder of our existence.”

“But I supposed love doesn't stop, even in wars.”

“People throughout time have grieved, have fallen in love, have fallen out of love. We are sometimes petty and sometimes heroic, and we have been that way forever.”

“In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension - which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.”

“I found a girl who wasn't the girl I was looking for. I let go of a friend I'll still miss every day. I'll go back to work. I'll get better. I'll get better slowly. I'll find all the secret, hidden things.”

“Girls in love will do desperate and creative things.”