I believe we recover from loss by facing the loss, grieving, going deep inside ourselves (hopefully with a guide) and re-emerging to live and love again.

It's not that I literally think I'm a fearie. It's just that I feel so different from most people. And this idea of a race living underground in caverns, spending all their days dancing and playing the fiddle and eating flowers and reciting poetry and sharing their dreams, that to me sounds much more real than the way people live in this world, hating and fighting and wanting and hurting.

Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.

The girl in the mirror wasn't who I wanted to be and her life wasn't the one I wanted to have.

That was when I cut my arms with a razor blade as a means of creative expression. I only did it lightly, just grazing the skin, to see the way the blood would bleed out, to make myself look tougher. Not like some of those kids who keep going deeper and deeper, wondering what they look like down to the bone, because it's a world that's so close and yet so far and so dangerous and so much their own. The only world that is their own.

Think of your pain like a bunch of red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one.

Any alphabet book for children where 'P is for Patti' Smith and 'X is for the women whose names we don't know' is something I can recommend, especially when the book is as well written, representationa lly diverse and vividly illustrated as this one.