“I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.”

And did I pass?” The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left, the younger woman said, “You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.

He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn’t occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.

Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.

You’re always you, and that doesn’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

Words save our lives, sometimes.

When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.

Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination.

What do stars do? They shine.

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful.

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.

Every hour wounds. The last one kills.

There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won’t remember and that she can’t even let herself think about because that’s when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it’s always raining a slow and endless drizzle.

Having children just puts the whole world into perspective. Everything else just disappears.

When I look at young kids today I just don’t believe it, parents take away the Gameboy and they’re suicidal. They cannot take the pressure.

Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can’t do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often before.

When you have kids you do grow up. I have just started realising it now-it changes the world, having children.

I didn’t want to be an actress; I never thought of being an actress because, as children, there were three of us – I was the middle child – and we spent our time in church from Sunday morning to Saturday night.

Remember who you are. Don’t compromise for anyone, for any reason. You are a child of the Almighty God. Live that truth.

Grief is a species of idleness.

My goal should never be to raise kids that make me look good. (Oh but how my flesh craves this!) My goal should be to raise kids who love God and spend their lives making His goodness known in their corner of the world.