There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.

Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good raw, and then put them in tins, and make them revolting.

Death is the second oldest of the Endless. It's hard not to love her. She loves you, after all.

'Doctor Who' was the first mythology that I learned, before ever I ran into Greek or Roman or Egyptian mythologies.

Time is fluid here', said the Demon.

That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.

I was a stranger and you took me in. -Joji G. Shoji, d. 1921