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.

I want my life to be mystifying," she declared, although she didn't know what she meant.

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

My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go.

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

Words on the page are never prisoners of the page

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.