I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.

Oh, of course, I always feel unconfident.

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

A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

Defining men as the perpetrators of all violence is a viciously immoral judgment of an entire gender. And defining women as inherently nonviolent condemns us to the equally restrictive role of sweet, meek, and weak.

Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over.

A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides in a soggy, rained-out afternoon midway always hit my chest with a sweet ache. The colored dance of lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour.