I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn't a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn't we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.

I'm no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I'm pretty sure that's flirting

So one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

When you're writing, at least when I'm writing, I don't think about themes and I try not to sermonize with any particular message.

Some of my favorite photos from the old days are of people who maybe didn't know how to smile. Maybe smiling in photos wasn't an accepted form of behavior back then. But the big eyes and the oversized dolls that people are carrying, and it's something about their hair - the anachronisms of these photos are really what creep me out.

Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth.

We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.