How would you feel about life if Death was your older sister?

People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.

Her other mother smiled brightly and the hair on her head drifted like plants under the sea.

It always felt like the price of being a writer was that you would - even in the most terrible moments, there was a little phantom version of you sitting on your shoulder with a notebook going, I can use this. OK, look at the way that the light is glinting off the broken plastic on the road next to the blood. You can use this. And it was always a very strange feeling.

All that I did," she said, "everything I tried to do. All for nothing." Nothing is done entirely for nothing, said the fox of dreams. Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions, and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned, and move on.

Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you're going to muck about here.

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.