We're news junkies in my house.

You cannot condemn a man for what may only be a figment of your own imagination.

Belief in the supernatural or belief in wild talents like precognition and telepathy and telekinesis and things like that, it seems to me that belief in those things is just very, very freeing.

Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There's no feeling on earth like it.

A great whispering noise began to rise in the woods on either side of the tracks, as if the forest had just noticed we were there and was commenting on it.

You said 'God is cruel' the way a person who's lived his whole life on Tahiti might say 'Snow is cold'. You knew, but you didn't understand." He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy's cold cheeks. "Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?

In a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips has written the novel of the year. It's the story of a serial killer's crimes and capture, yes, but it's also a compulsively readable story of how one brave woman faces up to acts of terrible violence in order to create something good and strong in the aftermath. Quiet Dell will be compared to In Cold Blood, but Phillips offers something Capote could not: a heroine who lights up the dark places and gives us hope in our humanity.