We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.

During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.

The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.

At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...

Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.

Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason.

When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, "Buffeted but not broken.

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

When someone's success makes you as happy as if it were your own, you know you've found someone worth holding on to.

We need to laugh at the irrationality of evil, for in doing so we deny evil's power over us, diminish its influence in the world, and tarnish the allure it has for some people.

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

Our music is always, as you know, very spacey- computer graphics, music, images, lyrics, and visual art we make ourselves, or that we make with artists. And it's all synchronized.

No age or time of life, no position or circumstance, has a monopoly on success. Any age is the right age to start doing!

A government of our own is our natural right

There's no reason why you can't deliver a grammar-school curriculum to an all-ability intake.

I am the federal government!

Well, you're not exactly Superman, but you're awfully available.