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

I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.

Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

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

Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope

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.