and her skin shone luminous and impossibly pale, as if it drank light from the moon.

When I first started studying Greek, one of my absolute favorite parts was realizing that so many English words had these old, secret roots. Learning Greek was like being given a super-power: linguistic x-ray vision.

Perhaps it is the greatest grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.

I lay back and tried not to think of the minutes passing. Just yesterday we had a wealth of them. Now each was a drop of heartsblood lost.

The very dull truth is that writing love scenes is the same as writing other scenes - your job is to be fully engaged in the character's experience. What does this mean to them? How are they changed by it, or not? I remember being a little nervous, as I am when writing any high-stakes, intense scene (death, sex, grief, joy).

and her skin shone luminous and impossibly pale, as if it drank light from the moon.

No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.