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.

There's fire in my fingers. I burn everything I touch.

A small town is nothing but eyes and gaping maw; it pecks at its own like a flock of vicious birds.

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.

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

I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that's sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair.