The story is always better than your ability to write it.

So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town--the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them--and put them all over my apartment. Take a good long look at everyone I love.

I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.

Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe.

I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.

But the uproar this caused was nothing compared with the uproar when Katronia noticed [Rosie] had also cut her eyelashes. Various negotiations (including, finally, such desperate measures as "supposing you ever want to eat again") eventually produced the grudging promise that, in return for Katronia keeping her hair cut short, she would leave her eyelashes alone.

Then marry me. For I love you, and I do not believe there is anything so wrong with you. You are fair in my eyes and you lie fair on my heart.