That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.

Most people know that Ray Bradbury is one of my favorite authors.

Let everyone see the blood,' he said. 'Don't clean it up. That's the only way people remember.'... I could see the blood inside my head. It was with me forever, whether or not I wanted to forget.

I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.

It was a great escape for me and it was a way to take a break from what was going on in my own world, to go into another world.

He stepped off the pavement like a man jumping off a bridge, as calm as a swimmer with an ocean out below. Lucy had known what he was going to do the instant their eyes met. She'd know what he intended because she would have done the very same thing if she'd had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall.

When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.