for 100,000 (dollars), you [can] flatten a house with a wrecking ball. Imagine how much less it [takes] to destroy something than it [does] to build it in the first place.

No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged.

We could all be lucky. We could all be what we want to be, instead of who someone else told us to be.

I'm not going to tell a person how to think, don't believe in that. What I want to do, when I write these books, is just to say don't be so sure of yourself. Let me pull the carpet out from underneath you, and let's see if you can still find the footing.

people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong.

There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it. They create so much gravitational pull there's no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion - that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, it's too late.

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.