Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality waiting to be shaped.

There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination.

I watch my heart disappearing into her rosebud mouth. My Valentine's jest somehow seems less funny.

There was a hysteria in there, certainly, but there was also the exhaustion of someone who had managed, somehow, to believe several dozen impossible things in the last twenty-four hours, without ever getting a proper breakfast.

You're a big one,[...] a tall drink of water, but I got to tell you, you don't look too bright. I got a son, stupid as a man who bought his stupid at a two-for-one sale, and you remind me of him.

We owe it to each other to tell stories.