Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

We invent what we love and what we fear.

Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?

Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.

No touching Baby Jesus.” “But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. “Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.