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

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?

The window gave onto a view of dove-gray roofs and balconies, each one containing the same cracked flowerpot and sleeping feline. It was as if the entire city of Paris had agreed to abide by a single understated taste. Each neighbor was doing his or her own to keep up standards, which was difficult because the French ideal wasn't clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

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.

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.

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.

I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.