I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.

Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.

I think being an editor really helped me take other people's notes on my writing. I'd get a note like 'It's too wet' or 'The first couple chapters are good, but then the rest of the pages were so wet that they were completely illegible' or 'Did you dip this in Sprite? This smells like Sprite. Why would you dip your novel in Sprite?' And instead of pushing back, I'd listen. That's an incredibly important skill for a young writer to have.

Now what? All the battles feminists won about not being a sex object, not being evaluated based on these things, that now other generations are wallowing in, the extremes they go to, to look sexually attractive? It's stunning how things that one fought desperately for are just being tossed aside with aplomb.

Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.

Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.