People can be unimaginably foolish...and they can be unimaginably grand, at times.

She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.

...a really good friend, the kind of friend who - when they were together both of them were more able to be who they really were.

Maybe life was like a sea, and all the people were like boats ... Everybody who was born was cast into the sea. Winds would blow them in all directions. Tides would rise and turn, in their own rhythm. And the boats - they just went along as best they could, trying to find a harbor.

Kids are really tougher than adults, but we tend to forget this in an affluent society that lets kids indulge themselves.

I have the feeling that I know who I am, only I'm not anymore.

If I'm writing by intuition, generally that calculation works itself out. But if I'm writing a mystery, and somebody has to have a reason for doing what he's doing, and it's not anything I can imagine myself wanting to do, things get a little more difficult to write, and careless mistakes are made.