People hide their truest nature. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves?

Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs.

Any institution becomes a community - whether it's a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.

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.

Everything was red, the air, the sun, whatever I looked at. Except for him. I fell in love with someone who was human. I watched him walk through the hills and come back in the evening when his work was through. I saw things no woman would see: that he knew how to cry, that he was alone. I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn't see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn't care that I was dying until I actually was.

Some people say, 'Save yourself and you save your ways.' I say, 'Be yourself and you save your soul.