So?" Bob said. "Hat up, go kill her. Problem solved." "Bob," I said. "You can't just go around killing people." "I know. That's why you should do it." "No, no. I can't go around killing people, either.

I ask people impertinent questions. Hopefully turning up pertinent answers.

[Mouse is] with us. The dog is a handicap-assist animal." The kid lifted his eyebrows. "My mouth is partially paralyzed," I said. "It makes it hard for me to rea. He's here to help me with the big words. Tell me if I'm supposed to push or pull on doors, that kind of thing.

Children are a precious gift, but they belong to no one but themselves. They are only lent us a little while.

The human mind isn't a terribly logical or consistent place. Most people, given the choice to face a hideous or terrifying truth or to conveniently avoid it, choose the convenience and peace of normality. That doesn't make them strong or weak people, or good or bad people. It just makes them people.

If you shoot, I will kill her before I die." Yes," Kitai said in a patient tone. "Which is why I have not shot you. Yet.

The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.