What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.

I don't want to tell people what to think. I'm the least qualified person in the world for that. If I'd go around pretending to be the expert on everything, I'd become Dan Brown, and I don't understand that. We all do our research if we're good writers, and we all work hard to get it right, but that doesn't mean we're experts in the field. The best we can do is challenge people to learn the facts themselves.

Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans: once you leave the litter, you server contact with your mothers.

If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.

Teachers deserve respect," I explain. "Why do they get it for free, when everyone else has to earn it?

Just 'cause you can't see me don't mean I gone away.