You cant be too careful on a skateboard.

There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal "Once upon a time.

Rage-the biggest, truest rage of her adult life-had invaded her like a fever, but it wasn't like any fever she had known previously. It circulated like weird serum, cold on the right side of her body, then hot on the left, where her heart was. It seemed to come nowhere near her head, which remained clear.

If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.

Love isn't soft, like the poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.

What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.

I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.