She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

It was the combination of many factors... With most people, suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.

The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.

But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.

I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretend

He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.