People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.

Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.