Wake up, Caitlin, Mr. Lensing had said. But what he didn't under­stand was that this dreamland was preferable, walking through this life half-sleeping, everything at arm's length or farther away.

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

Accepting all the good and bad about someone. It's a great thing to aspire to. The hard part is actually doing it.

Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.

I've found in my own life that if my writing isn't going well, not much else will. It is the one constant, the key to everything else.

It took a lot of work to be perfect. If you didn’t want to break a sweat, there was no point in even bothering.

It was kind of soothing, these sounds of lives being lived all around me, for better or for worse. And there I was, in the middle of them all, newly reborn and still waiting for mine to begin.