She had witnessed the world's most beautiful things, and allowed herself to grow old and unlovely. She had felt the heat of a leviathan's roar, and the warmth within a cat's paw. She had conversed with the wind and had wiped soldier's tears. She had made people see, she'd seen herself in the sea. Butterflies had landed on her wrists, she had planted trees. She had loved, and let love go. So she smiled.

More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.

Strange how love coexists with hate, how they render eachother mute, how the swilling of them together makes a new and softer, sympathetic thing.

How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?

You're not supposed to have iron bars around you - no one is supposed to have that. You're supposed to fall down hills and get lonely, and find your own food and get wet when it rains. That's what happens when you're alive.

Every atom in me feels composed of lead. This is what dying is: a pull to the ground.

She doesn't understand that doors, walls, fences, ceilings - they're helpless to keep out what determinedly desires to get in.