It's stupid. There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other's miseries. It is that which makes us family.

For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.

You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.