We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.

If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.

They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.

This can't be true but I remember it.

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.