Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you.

I can see your dirtypillows.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

I'm most afraid of losing my mind. You lose your identity, your sense of who you are, where you are.

...knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine.

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.

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.