No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.

Listening to it was like having a mud-slimed piece of silk drawn lightly back and forth across her face.

There is a relationship between humor and fear. Think of all the gags you ever heard that have to do with dismemberment, or something that's horrible in one way or another, even if it's just horrible in the sense that somebody's being embarrassed. What do kids laugh at? Kids laugh if your fly's down. That's hilarious. But for the kid whose fly is down, it's a horrible situation.

Any parting could be forever, and we don't know.

Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.

The truth is in the details.

He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he's alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility.