The only people out at this hour were ones who couldn't sleep,those haunted by one thing or another:love thwarted, love lost, love thrown away. They were the sort of people who didn't want to be noticed, who wanted to slip through shadows, be alone with their despair.

Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

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.

Sometimes words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn't unknow.

Our house was littered with books- in the kitchen, under the beds, stuck between the couch pillows--far too many for her the ever finish. I suppose I thought if my grandmother kept up her interests, she wouldn't die; she'd have to stay around to finish the books she was so fond of. "I've got to get to the bottom of this one," she'd say, as if a book were no different from a pond or a lake. I thought she'd go on reading forever but it didn't work out that way.

The adults don't know what's happening on the kids' universe and the kids don't know what's happening on the adults' universe

[Fairy tales] are like a journey to the woods and the many ways you can get lost. Some people say it's not a good idea to read fairy tales to anyone under the age of eight because they are brutal and raw. When I was a kid I often felt that kids's books were speaking down to me, but I never felt that way about fairy tales. They are bloody and scary, but so is life.