Teachers wondered why I didn't speak up more in class. Why would I when I knew how precarious words could be, how betraying they were, how vulnerable they made you?

What was so miraculous about a relationship that was based more on my gratitude than on mutual self respect?

Like world describers before me, those mapmakers in the seventeenth centure, I had laid down my first faintly drawn border. With that one tentative mark, my world expanded by a few freeing degrees.

To dream is to starve doubt, feed hope.

Jolie laide = "pretty ugly" Draws you to it...bored into heart and mind.

I just told Max flatly, "I had laser surgery last week to lighten my birthmark," as if it was no big deal. Oh yeah?" he said. Unexpectedly, Max swiveled around, yanked his pants down. The last thing I thought I had wanted to see tonight was Merc walking out the door. I was wrong. It was this stranger's rear end. "Please don't tell me this is one of those stripping telegrams?

Silence, too, can be torture.