After it's all over, the early childhood, a chain of birthdays woven with candlelight, piles of presents, voices of relatives singing and praising your promise and future, after the years of schooling, fitting yourself into different size desks, memorizing, reciting, reporting, and performing for jury after jury of teachers, counselors, and administrators, you still feel inadequate, alone, vulnerable, and naked in a world that can be unforgiving and terribly demanding.

... and still I stayed to plan all my revenge, my vengeance against those who had turned me from good to evil, and made of me what I was going to be from this day forward.

There was a war going on in our house. A silent war that sounded no guns, and the bodies that fell were only wishes that died and the bullets were only words and the blood that spilled was always called pride.

I am a pretty, useless ornament who always believed she'd have a man to take care of her.

The creative genius begins in the idle moment, dreaming up the impossible, and later making it come true.

Love, when it came and knocked on my door, was going to be enough. And that unknown author who'd written that if you had fame, it was not enough, and if you had wealth as well, it was still not enough, and if you had fame, wealth, and also love ... still it was not enough - boy, did I feel sorry for him.

I saw myself dancing alone, always alone.