In losing a friend, she is reminded of all she has lost and all she stands to lose again. There is nothing to be done to make it any easier. We all grieve alone.

My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.

I wept to think that life went on even when so much had been lost, that rain still fell and myrtle grew between the rocks.

It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too.

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.

Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.

You are only worthy of what you prove yourself to be.