Nobody will ever hurt her. She’ll just smile her faint vague wonderful smile and walk away.

A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.

Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

It does not matter where you come from, if you walk toward the truth you will reach it, whatever path you take.

In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything.