I know you did, lass. You're the toughest girl I know." "'Lass'? Where did that come from?" "I don't know. I just felt the urge to call you that.

Liz looks at the tissue box, which is decorated with drawings of snowmen engaged in various holiday activities. One of the snowmen is happily placing a smiling rack of gingerbread men in an oven. Baking gingerbread men, or any cooking for that matter, is probably close to suicide for a snowman, Liz thinks. Why would a snowman voluntarily engage in an activity that would in all likelihood melt him? Can snowmen even eat? Liz glares at the box.

People are capable of great, great change during the span of one lifetime. And women even more than men.

Sometimes books don't find us until the right time.

Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.

Oh, all stories are the same, aren't they? Men and women fall in love or out of love. People are born; people die. It al ends happily or it all ends sadly, and the difference matters only to the people involved.

The things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life