May God strike me down with a hammer on the head before I write a book with a teach-y goal!

I'm predisposed to think that as a people, we're hardwired to understand things through the telling of stories. I think that as human beings it's part of who we are.

There's a Buddhist precept that the only thing you deserve is the chance to do the work, and I've been given the chance to do the work.

The undoing is almost always more difficult than the doing.

Did you think that rats do not have hearts? Wrong. All living things have a heart. And the heart of any living thing can be broken.

But still, here are the words Despereaux Tilling spoke to his father. He said, "I forgive you, Pa!" And he said those words because he sensed that it was the only way to save his heart, to stop it from breaking in two. Despereaux, reader, spoke those words to save himself.

Once upon a time," he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.