I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.

Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.

She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost

It is a mark of the depth of their wounding that they are pretending they suspected it all along. Everything that they have seen and been told about love so far has been an inside perspective, and they are not prepared for the crashing weight of this exclusion. It dawns on them now how much they never saw and how little they were wanted, and with this dawning comes a painful re-imagining of the self as peripheral, uninvited, and utterly minor.

I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. Its always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact its so supple and sly.

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.

Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.