As a writer, you want to go somewhere else sometimes. You want to vary the terrain that you're exploring.

Structure is, for me, the most fun challenge about writing novels.

A friend of mine urged me to see my pain as an opportunity. And since the same psychic that contacted Dion Fortune had told me that I was a "teacher" - she didn't mean at Columbia, she meant in the spiritual sense - I decided my affliction was the universe telling me that it was time to stop writing fiction and become the spiritual guru I was clearly meant to be.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. In other words: Home has exceedingly low standards.

We want to believe we couldn't be replaced, and that the people we love are irreplaceable.

Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.

You know you're screwed when a Western doctor recommends acupuncture.