“When you break something and leave it lying there for someone to pick up the pieces, you don't get much say in how they put it back together.”

“Well, good afternoon, sunshine. How are you feeling?""Like something the cat dragged in, then dragged back outside to leave in the rain, and mud, then the lightning hit it, and burned it, and the cat came back to tear it into pieces, before burying it.”

“Reason is the hero who breaks the chains of our prejudice, saving us from the prison of our comfortable acquiescence in the way of the world.”

“The summer I turned eleven, I found out that ghosts are real. Guess it's hard to rest nice and easy in your coffin if you got stuff on your mind. Your soul stays chained to earth instead of zipping up to heaven to sing in one of the angel choirs. Sometimes ghosts show up in the msot peculiar places. Sometimes ghosts fool you. Then you are those ghosts that hang around because we have unfinished business. Business that sinks like old crawfish left in a bucket for a week. That's some nasty smell let me tell you. But the most important thing I learned is that ghosts can help you spill your guts before guilt eats you up and leaves a hole that can't ever be fixed no matter how many patches you try to steam iron across it.”

“No one can ever say the name Abel without saying Cain first.”

“What I mean by reading is not skimming, not being able to say as the world saith, "Oh, yes, I've read that!," but reading again and again, in all sorts of moods, with an increase of delight every time, till the thing read has become a part of your system and goes forth along with you to meet any new experience you may have.”

“She was grieving the loss of her youth, the closing down of possibilities as life became what it was rather than what it might have been.”