You can widen the feet of a compass, but they are still attached at the top; you can spin them away from each other, but you always wind up where you started.

There's a lot of things you can't see if you aren't' looking.

I learned a lot that night. For example, that part of being the magician's assistant means coming face-to-face with illusion. That invisibility is really just knotting your body in a certain way and letting the black curtain fall over you. That people don't vanish into thin air; that when you can't find someone, it's because you've been misdirected to look elsewhere.

If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.

I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.

If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?

No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst.