All you did was sit there, he said. Why are you so tired? I sat very diligently, she said.

Perhaps it is a human thing, to look upon such beauty and fail to encompass it.

...but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago "something or other or die" had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other.

I said: "He cannot be so bad if he loves roses so much." "But he is a Beast," said Father helplessly. I saw that he was weakening, and wishing only to comfort him I said, "Cannot a Beast be tamed?"

But the world turns, and even legends change; and somewhere there is a border, and sometime, perhaps, someone will decide to cross it, however well guarded its thorns may be.

I don't differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children's or YA stories particularly.

It doesn't matter if I'm only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months' supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham's story "The Book-Bag.