Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.

I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I'm sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.

Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.

You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.

I hope to be a good role model for my daughters.

...women, brave as stars at dawn

When I meet people for the first time, I always put on my glasses because I feel like that's a little something extra between me and them. It's like the Laurence Dunbar poem "We Wear the Mask."