Accidents happen. Our bones shatter, our skin splits, our hearts break. We burn, we drown, we stay alive.

I am afraid of everybody else's secrets

There's this magical place, ' he says with mock solemnity, 'called a library--I don't know if you've heard of it, but they have books, and also newspaper, and back issues of newspapers...

I think that we all drown, in one way or another.

We bite back the things we can't say and we cushion every surface for the inevitable moment when they all come fighting out.

In the ghost house in the last days of the accident season, we were never going to die.

People expect a lot more from someone they think looks interesting. It's a burden.

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

It is a mystery why people think they need to act as their friends' dietitian, nonetheless it's common.

The thing that makes me feel powerful is when I make a decision about something and I make it happen.

The thing is you can be a great designer but you can also be lazy or not understand the other person's preferences or be more concerned about being a star than being good at what you do.

People on the pathway to enlightenment become very successful in whatever they approach, because they have learned to discipline the mind.

I'm a would-be rebel. The good girl who'd like to be a bad one.

Ma sighed gently and said, "A whole year gone, Charles." But Pa answered, cheerfully: "What's a year amount to? We have all the time there is.

Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.

Nothing gets a bigger laugh than when you refer to things like ethics or human rights.