For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time.

In the country of the story the writer is king.

I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.

There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.

I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.

All I could think of when I got a look at the place from the outside was what fun it would be to stand out there and watch it burn down.

All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...