Sometimes people go off in a slightly different direction of wanting to be different, of wanting to be special, of wanting to be more, and I think that those people are often - not always, but often - genuinely different in some way. Perhaps their gender orientation is not acceptable or popular, not the norm. Or, their physical design is literally, in some way, setting them apart. Or, in many cases, they feel the burden of their ordinariness so dreadfully that they strive to find some way of being unique. I think that can be a very positive thing, but it also can be negative, destructive.

I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.

I am here, come closer," the old donkey said with her eyes. "I will mother you.

We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.

In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless.

How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.