“Sometimes, Edie, a person's feelings aren't rational. At least, they don't seem that way on the surface. You have to dig a little deeper to understand what lies at the base”

“Rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.”

“No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don't approximate. Don't settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.”

“You'll beat this. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you will. You're a survivor.""I don't want to survive it.""I know that, too," Nell had said. "And it's fair enough. But sometimes we don't have a choice...”

“Mother didn't understand that children aren't frightened by stories; that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales.”

“. . . weary of knowing too much and understanding too little.”

“True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.”