A man bumps me on his busy way without so much as an apology. But that is all right. I forgive you, busy man about town with the sharp elbows. Hail and farewell to you!...

But we can’t go back. We can only go forward.

One day, as Sarita tended to the wash, Gemma played in the garden. She was a knight, you see, with a sword fashioned out of wood. Most formidable, she was, though I didn’t quite know...

Travel opens your mind as few other things do. It is its own form of hypnotism, and I am forever under its spell.

I’ve been thinking about that book about the boys who crash on the island….Lord of the Flies what about it….You know how you said it wasn’t a true measure of humanity since there were no...

A guy’s gotta live, you know, gotta make his way and find his meaning in life and love, and to do that he needs coffee, he needs coffee and coffee and coffee.

Peace is not happenstance. It is a living fire that must be fed constantly. It must be tended to with vigilance, else it dies out.

Just once, she’d like to be the exciting one, the girl somebody wanted.

Sorry,” she said, heading for the bow, where a spot of sun looked inviting. ”Oh, also, about that blog? Just so you know, my dads know a lot of gay lawyers. Bitches will take your...

There’s no such thing as nothing. In every nothing, there’s a something. In fact, there could be everything!

You are working up to Mr. Fantastic Fiction levels of Zombie Expert, which is like playing Guitar Hero on some level that actually melts the guitar controller, burning your fingers with searing hot plastic till...

You set fire to my house, killed my family, and ate my dog. But steal my boyfriend? That’s a step too far.

No one asks how or what I am doing. They could not care less. We’re all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they’d like to be seen....

I understand we’ll be attending your friend Miss Worthington’s Christmas ball. Perhaps I’ll find a suitable– which is to say wealthy– wife among the ladies attending.”And perhaps they will run screaming for the convent.

Weren’t you wearing a purity ring when we got here? Aren’t you supposed to be saving yourself?” Shanti asked. “Yeah,” Mary Lou answered. “And then I thought, for what? You save leftovers. My sex is...

I run after her, not really giving chase. I’m running because I can, because I must.Because I want to see how far I can go before I have to stop.

Evie wanted to cry. From fear. From exhaustion, yes. But mostly from the cruel uselessness, the damned stupid arbitrariness of it all.

Wow, I miss Latin. So much fun – all those exciting verbs that don’t come unit the end of the sentence. It’s like a movie trailer for language.

On the Bowery, in the ornate carcass of a formerly grand vaudeville theater, a dance marathon limps along. The contestants, young girls and their fellas, hold one another up, determined to make their mark, to...

It’s strange how deliberate people are after a death. All the indecision suddenly vanishes into clear, defined moments – changing the linens, choosing a dress or a hymn, the washing up, the muttering of prayers....

I’ve never been in love. I will die without knowing what it feels like to need to see one person’s face when you go to sleep at night, to crave seeing it when you wake...

I can see his pain, see it in the way he runs his fingers through his hair, over and over, and I understand what it costs him to hide it all.

Sometimes I just want to go in a room and break things and scream. Like, it’s so much pressure all the time and if you get upset or angry, people say, ‘Are you on the...

Mr. Babcock pats my shoulder. He smiles, and the caterpillar mustache — the envy of state troopers everywhere, I’m sure — straightens out again. I hear that on the weekends, he’s a part-time security guard...

Careful there, Poet. I might start to believe you.

Hold up. How do you accidentally have sex with somebody?” Adina scoffed. “Is she all, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t s ee your penis there’?”Tiara squealed and waved her hands. “Don’t say that word!””What?...

The world expected girls to pluck and primp and put on heels. Meanwhile, boys dressed in rumpled T-shirts and baggy pants and misplace their combs, and yet you were suppose to fall at their feet?...

The police have asked for my help. There’s been a murder.””A murder! Oh, my. Let me just change my shoes,” Evie said excitedly. “It won’t be a minute.

Sexuality is not meant to be this way – an honest, consensual expression in which a girl might take an active role when she feels good and ready and not one minute before. No. Sexual...

You can never know about about your own destiny: are the people you meet there to play a part on your oun destiny, or do you exist just to play a role in theirs?

War.” Gorgon spits the word. “That is what they call it to give the illusion of honor and law. It is chaos. Madness and blood and the hunger to win. It has always been thus...

We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion trying to emerge into something solid, something real. We’ve got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there’s an...

Board the cows! We’ve come to enslave your marigolds.

Miss New Mexico stared, dumbfounded. “Stand out? Stand out? I have a freaking tray stuck in my forehead!” She broke into fresh sobs.Taylor clapped for attention. “Miss New Mexico, let’s not get all down in...

I think about dying every day, because I can’t stop thinking about living.

Oh, honey, of course it hurts! Beauty is pain. But you don’t want to look like a troll, do you?

Writers are also sort of like vultures, but with fewer ethics.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I should like to finish my book, alone, without the presence of a single ringleted girl to disrupt me. If you should come for me at dinner and find...

I’m not that kind of Indian,” Shanti said, her practiced smile never leaving her face, though it faltered just a bit, and in that slight wobble was something hard and angry, something that looked like...

Write like it matters, and it will.

You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Felicity and Ann hunched over their ornaments as if they were fascinating relics from an archaeological dig. I note that their shoulders are trembling, and...

…There’s an -or- in -whore- because you always have a choice to respect your body and say no.

Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren’t we all just a little crazy?

We’re all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away–our stories. I guess that’s what I love about books–they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another...

Forgiveness. The frail beauty of the world takes root in me as I make my way back through the woods, past the caves and the ravine, where the earth has accepted the flesh of the...

What if evil doesn’t really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and...

There is no greater power on this earth than story.