I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, men who made you love them then changed their minds.

I wondered where he was now whether I would ever hear him again. Whether someone would love him, someday show him what beauty mean't.

This is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.

Now I wish she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.

When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.

Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.