“Who are you, Dorothy?" she said beneath her breath. "Who were you, before you became Ma?”

“It matters not, for she did not need her eyes to tell her who she was. She knew it by your love for her.”

“A way of looking at you that told you she was listening, that she understood all you were saying, and all you weren't.”

“She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages.”

“People marveled at her ability to build characters from the inside out, to submerge herself and disappear beneath the skin of another person, but there was no trick to it; she merely bothered to learn the character's secrets. Laurel knew quite a bit about keeping secrets. She also knew that was where the real people were found, hiding behind their black spots.”

“Life'd be a lot easier if it were like a fairy tale," said Cassandra, "if people belonged to stock character types.""Oh, but people do, they only think they don't. Even the person who insists such things don't exist is a cliché: the dreary pedant who insists on his own uniqueness!”

“She'd filled twelve notebooks and still she hadn't stopped. Indeed, the more she wrote, the louder the stories seemed to grow, swirling in her mind, pressing against her head, anxious for release. She didn't know whether they were any good and in truth she didn't care. They were hers, and writing made them real somehow.”