I turned down Halloween parties every year, where people wanted zombies raised at the stroke of midnight or some such nonsense. The scarier my reputation got, the more people wanted me to come be scary for them. I'd told Bert I could always go and threaten to shoot all the partygoers, that'd be scary. Bert had not been amused. But he had stopped asking me to do parties.

I wondered if I had offended him. I wondered if I cared.

Who would have ever thought I'd be afraid of a zombie, any kind of zombie? Nicely ironic that.

Can you truly love anyone if you do not first love yourself? If you hate yourself, can you love anyone else? If you do not accept all of who you are, can you accept anyone else? Hard questions. It remains to be seen whether I get any answers, hard, or otherwise.

A flower may be beautiful all on its own, but a person is never truly beautiful unless someone's eyes show him that he is beautiful.

She doesn't understand what she's asking, Jean-Claude said. No, but she asks, and if we do not do it, we will always wonder. I would rather thy and fail than regret having never tried at all.

So many wonderful books to write, and not enough hours in the day. An embarrassment of riches.