As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye.

A funny line can never exist on its own. It needs to be surrounded by mood and circumstances.

The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.

No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots.

I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me.

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.