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

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.

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, you’re doing something.

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.

A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.

I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don’t want to be sane.

To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.

You don’t have to stay anywhere forever.

There’s none so blind as those who will not listen.

Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again. Whenever it rains you will think of her.

Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.

What I liked about American movies when I was a kid was that they’re sort of larger than life and I think I’m still suffering from that reaction.

I was brought up by my mother and my two sisters, although they’re older than me and fled the nest very young, so I was technically raised as an only child, but I was very much loved.

Children are God’s way of punishing us for having sex.

I’ve learned, That you should never say no to a gift from a child.

I’ve learned That having a child fall asleep in your arms is one of the most peaceful feelings in the world.

I’ll admit it: I’m a control freak. I am. If I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it 110% or there’s no point in doing it at all, especially if the work takes me away from time with my husband and children.

Is it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them?