Rosa Hubermann was sitting on the edge of the bed with her husband's accordion tied to her chest. Her fingers hovered above the keys. She did not move. She didn't ever appear to be breathing.

When death captures me,' the boy vowed, 'he will feel my fist on his face.' Personally, I quite like that. Such stupid gallantry. Yes. I like that a lot.

Things always seem to glide away. They come to you, stay a moment, then leave again.

What would you do if you were me? Tell me. Please tell me! But you're far from this. Your fingers turn the strangeness of these pages that somehow connect my life to yours. Your eyes are safe. The story is just another few hundred pages of your mind. For me, it's here. It's now. I have to go through with this, considering the cost at every turn. Nothing will be the same.

How'd it feel?" Rube asked himself. "I don't know exactly, but it made me want to howl.

Clearly," said Arthur,"you're an idiot- but you're our kind of idiot. Come on.

There are two magic acts I want to pull off when I write. One is creating a feeling that when you're inside a book, you believe everything you're reading even when you know it's not true. And the second is an extension of that, which is you know it's not true, you know it's not real, but you believe it anyway. And it's that believing of the story that isn't real that attracted me to writing and storytelling in general.