I wasn't quite as certain that I knew her soul. When it came right down to it, I wasn't sure she knew me either.

When I read Jerome D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" that was the first time I felt my mind blow open. I thought that book was speaking to me. I was 12 or 13 when I read that. I read everything on my mother's bookshelves.

In a world of sorrow, love was an act of will. All you needed were the right ingredients.

I thought that love was a river, endless and deep. I thought it merely happened, washing over you like water. It was nothing to search for, nothing to force. I didn't understand that even when we can't control our fate, we alone have the last say in matters of the heart. We can give it freely, even in the worst of times, even when it isn't returned.

She was disappearing a little more each day, so thin, so frail, a wisp of smoke. One day she would surely vanish altogether, and there was no way to stop her.

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?

They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I'm interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women's stories are all kind of combined.