Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.

Flora would have liked to ask her parents why the words ‘to father’ have such a different meaning from the words ‘to mother’.

We dare to live.

Don't just discover . . . Encounter!

I am going to shrink and shrink until I am a dry fall leaf, complete with a translucent spine and brittle veins, blowing away in a stiff wind, up, up, up into a crisp blue sky.

I'm going to bed, where I may die.

I'm not very good in a classroom sort of setting. I never was. I was kind of a clown in high school - got suspended a lot.

I want to go anywhere and everywhere and explore as much as I can.

A parent, unlike a poet, is not born - he is made.

Odors have an altogether peculiar force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight or the hearing.

Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.

Instincts under pressure crush the carbon of conformity and create diamonds. Each new season of life offers to train us for the next season if we pay attention and adapt.