No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.

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.

These people picked you up and played with you and then left you lying in the rain

I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.

purification in fire. public cremation

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.