Your mother won a special reward," she told me, "because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded.

If you try anything, if you try to lose weight, or to improve yourself, or to love, or to make the world a better place, you have already achieved something wonderful, before you even begin. Forget failure. If things don't work out the way you want, hold your head up high and be proud. And try again. And again. And again!

From up above, in a plane passing over, you’d just see one little light in all this dark, with no idea of the lives that were being lived within it, and in the house beside, and beside that one. So much happening in the world, night and day, hour by hour. It was no wonder we were meant to sleep, if only to check out of it for a little while.

So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

“In Truth,” I said, “there are no rules other than you have to tell the truth.” “How do you win?” he asked. “That,” I said, “is such a boy question.

Of course it hurts", she grumbled, tipping my head further back. "Life sucks. Get over it

It was always late at night, when everything and everyone else was quiet, that those voices would rise like ghosts, soft and haunting, filling your mind until sleep finally came.