Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they have been given with good intentions , because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance

Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.