We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.

Though as he'd say, what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

When we're young, we like happy endings. When we're a little older, we think happy endings are unrealistic and so we prefer bad but credible endings. When we're older still, we realize happy endings aren't so bad after all.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.