She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.

She knows where she's going, and what she has to do. She could, after all, find her way to Route 95 South blindfolded. She could do it in the dark, in fair weather or foul; she can do it even when it seems she will run out of gas. It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

No barrier was strong enough to keep out the movement of time.

The nature of love had totally escaped her until now. She had thought that if you lost it, you could never get it back, like a stone thrown down a well. But it was like the water at the bottom of the well, there when you can't even see it, shifting in the dark.

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.

Once you know some things, you can't unknow them. It's a burden that can never be given away.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist