As I watch, the sky fills with clouds of snow feathers from every kind of bird there ever was and even some that only exist in the imagination, like the bluebirds that fly over the rainbow.

Julia's vocabulary was "chock-full" of strangely archaic words - "spiffing," "crumbs," "jeepers" - that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.

Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.

Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.

Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.

Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics - such as: if there are less than five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning.

You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.