She needed to get out of there. Her brains, thankfully, were still safely in her skull, but her emotions were splattered on the pavement.

the more the merrier. so enjoy reading more books

Since I was a small child, I was always writing either poems or plays... plays in which I had the starring part.

Humiliation, by the way, is a truly terrible emotion. It's at the bottom of the pile.

Love was more than blind. It was deaf and dumb, too. It was catatonic. It was vegetative.

Ella's supersonic voice followed her all the way to Bleecker Street and then dissolved amid the noisy profusion of shops, cafes, and restaurants and the crush of people that made the West Village of Manhattan unique in the world. In a single block you could buy fertility statues from Tanzania, rare Amazonian orchids, a pawned brass tuba, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, or the best, most expensive cup of coffee you ever tasted. It was the doughnuts, incidentally, that attracted Gaia.

As pathetic as it was, she'd rather hold on to the possibility of something perfect than be hit with the reality of nothing much.