she’s not as pretty as you,” I said “But she’s a simpler girl,” my mother whispered.

Pick a better verb. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an A-bomb.

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.

If this was a sandalwood pyre she would have thrown herself in and this paper she'd become would have caught fire and she and him could sail away like two birds.

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

...You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump.

There is no God, there is only what you want.