Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

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.

To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful.

The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

We read so that we can be moved by a new way of looking at things.

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

In a train...smash. In his arm her last...breath.' He had loved her. But he hated himself more. Such suffering, so much pain. And he thought it made him hateful. As if suffering was shameful, disgusting, as if pain were a crime. Who can judge another man's suffering?