My portal to another world was fiction.

I just like that balance of the real and the fantastical because as a reader and consumer of stories and fantasy, I always want to feel like I can find that world.

Sometimes it's better not to look back.

Our debt was too great and the words thank you too small.

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.

If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.

I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.