And red is not the color of apples or roses or the dresses that pretty girls wear in the summertime. That is not the color of red at all.

His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield.

The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father's study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.

She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all

I would kill for a cheeseburger. Honestly. If I stumbled across someone eating a cheeseburger, I would kill them for it.

How oft do they rescue or ruin us, through whimsy or design or a combination of both, the adults to whom we entrust our care!

What boy my age didn’t dream of fleeing the well-tended lawn and lamp-lit street for the untamed wilderness, where grand adventure awaited on the other side of the horizon, where the stars burned undimmed in the velvet sky above his head and the virgin ground lay untrodden beneath his feet?