Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

Approval is overrated...Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without.

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

I never write a book unless I can't help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.

But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.

She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands-as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her own way.