Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.

To Beatrice- My love flew like a butterfly Until death swooped down like a bat As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said: 'That's the end of that.

My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.

The expression 'Those who can't do, teach' is a curious one, because if you look at the world , you'll see that teachers aren't particularly worse at doing things than anyone else, so perhaps the expression might be better worded as 'nobody can do anything

The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up. Like a tie at a tag sale, some perfect thing in a crate of nothing, you were just there, uninvited, and now suddenly the party was over and you were all I wanted. I hadn't even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart's desire.

This is love, to sit with someone you've known forever in a place you've been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it's time to go.

Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again.