Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.

Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star. It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.

If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.

And her sleep was too long and deep for that:so deep that she left her normal reality behind.

Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.

I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I?

A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over.