These houses had been plunked down with an alarming randomness -- unevenly spaced, on crooked lines, like whoever had designed the place had said, "We'll just follow this cat, and wherever he sits down, we'll build something.

Money is for doing things, my love. Don't sit on it like a hen sits on an egg. It doesn't hatch. I should know. I've made enough of it.

The kids I talk to are readers, and the craziest, the most dedicated readers you will ever see.

I'm the last of the mad ones.

I am a mass of contradictions.

I knew it was beautiful, but knowing something is beautiful and caring about it are two very different things, and I didn't care.

Sometimes I even felt like he dated me as part of his plan, like they were going to have a checklist on the application, and one of the things to tick off was going to be, "Do you have a reasonably intelligent girlfriend who shares your aspirations, and who is fully prepared to accept your limited availability?