Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.

Coraline opened the box of chocolates. The dog looked at them longingly. "Would you like one?" she asked the little dog. "Yes, please," whispered the dog. "Only not toffee ones. They make me drool." "I thought chocolates weren't very good for dogs," she said, remembering something Miss Forcible had once told her. "Maybe where you come from," whispered the little dog. "Here, it's all we eat.

I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyways.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.

I think...that I would rather recollect a life mis-spent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt.

They were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses but which can go on forever, if both parties are willing.