Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

By the 6th grade I stopped doing ordinary things in front of people. It had been ordinary to sing, kids are singing all the time when they are little, but then something happens. It's not that we stop singing. I still sang. I just made sure I was alone when I did it. And I made sure I never did it accidentally. That thing we call 'bursting into song.' I believe this happens to most of us. We are still singing, but secretly and all alone.

The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad its there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isnt dead.

Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves.

The point of the daily diary exercise is not to record what you already know about what happened to you in the last 24 hours. Instead, it’s an invitation to the back of your mind to come forward and reveal to you the perishable images about the day you didn’t notice you noticed at all.

A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.