You're drinking in the joy of life,' Bear told her when she tried to explain why she was laughing. 'There's so much opportunity for drinking deeply of it, and we very rarely do it. When you do, it makes you feel alive all over.

There was a silence. Then Paul looked at Alex. 'She knows Chesterton.' 'She lives,' said Alex.

Have you ever felt that there was something going on in life that not everyone was aware of?

The boys at school are so degenerate that it makes one feel pessimistic about the future of the male gender in general.

One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about.

She remembered that once, when she was a little girl, she had seen a pretty young woman with golden hair down to her knees in a long flowered dress, and had said to her, without thinking, "Are you a princess?" The girl had laughed very kindly at her and asked her what her name was. Blanche remembered going away from her, led by her mother's hand, thinking to herself that the girl really was a princess, but in disguise. And she had resolved that someday, she would dress as though she were a princess in disguise.

Every once in a while you just have to decide to do something very crazy and very right--just to dare yourself to live. I don't mean doing something stupid and destructive--just something fun and good and beautiful.