...but now the worst crime was pretending to be something you were not.

I thought of the bowl of water my mother taught me to look into. It was true, everything a person ever needed to know was right there in a single bowl small enough to fit in the palm of one hand.

What I like about fairy tales is the language and the matter-of-fact way of introducing magic, where it's accepted that a fox could talk or a gate could just appear in a wall. I think fairy tales are so psychological.

One of my favorites is "Time and Again" by Jack Finney. It takes place in Manhattan and goes back and forth between 1882 and the 1950s. It's really a cult book.

I hate it when people tell me the end of the story because my mother always read the last page of a novel first to see whether she wanted to read it. It was a strange reading habit.

My grandmother told me once that when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. There are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shines like heaven, so far above us we can never hope to reach such heights.

Feel lucky for what you have when you have it. Isn't that the point? Happily ever after doesn't mean happy forever.