...Listen to your own thoughts and feelings very carefully, be aware of your observations, and learn to value them. When you're a teenager—and even when you're older—lots of people will try to tell you what to think and feel. Try to stand still inside all of that and hear your own voice. It's yours and only yours, it's unique and worth of your attention, and if you cultivate it properly, it might just make you a writer.

Most people, if they were generous, were so because they thought life was short and that one must make the most of it. Sid Baxter was generous because he knew that life was long. It went on and on even when you had no use for it anymore. It was happiness, not life, that was short, and when it visited - in the form of a fine evening spent talking with a friend - he honoured it.

He pressed himself into me and kissed my neck, and it was as if everything strong and solid inside me, heart and bones and muscle and gut, softened and melted from the heat of him.

Cripes Miss Wilcox, they're not guns,' I said. No, they're not Mattie, they're books. And a hundred times more dangerous.

Things are NEVER what they seem, Pa, I thought. I used to think they were, but I was wrong or stupid or blind or something. Old folks are forever complaining about their failing eyesight, but I think your vision gets better as you get older. Mine surely was.

And Robespierre, the Incorruptible, who loved us so much he cut off our heads so we would not be troubled by too many thoughts.

Because beautiful things never last. Not roses nor snow… And not fireworks, either