I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

Ron: Why spiders? Why couldn't it be "follow the butterflies?

Contemplating the task ahead would not make it easier or the water warmer.

Every writer prefers good reviews over bad ones, and every writer wants to have lots of readers. But if it doesn't happen, that's fine too. Perhaps I won't throw a party then; I'll simply go home and keep writing.

You place too much importance... on the so-called purity of blood! You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!

In fact, you couldn't give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.

Why was she always so craven, so apologetic? He had always seen Ruth as separate, good and untainted. As a child, his parents had appeared to him as starkly black and white, the one bad and frightening, the other good and kind. Yet as he had grown older, he kept coming up hard in his mind against Ruth's willing blindness, to her constant apologia for his father, to the unshakeable allegiance to her false idol.