To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.

You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.

Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.

Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.

The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.

Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks.

But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.

In the end, it's not what we keep our children from that will save them. It's what we put into them in the first place.

His smile banished my loneliness and limbed the hollows of my anema with starlight, pure and bright...his touch hummed in my bones like an aria -- a song to my dance, a beginning of a promise.

At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.

You guys line up alphabetically by height.

She is such a good friend that she would throw all her acquaintances into the water for the pleasure of fishing them out again.

Do good to your friend to keep him, and to your enemy to make him your friend.

We are being governed by the dregs of the nation - and their brutality is so capricious that no one can feel certain that he will be safe tomorrow.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

And anyway, who wears a tiara on a jungle gym?