You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know.

I think that Oprah's on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.

To make films, you have to have boundless energy; you have to work and play with others really, really well, and I'm really a more contemplative kind of person. I like to sit at home and think, a lot.

A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you've already written. Often the story you're looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.

She should think about her own soul, what she was going to do with this funky tattered pond dank item. Dark and stained, a ruined thing.

I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children between friends family things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost more easily than anyone could imagine.

She was starting to think there might be such a thing as karma - that repetition - maybe you lived through the same thing over and over until you stopped caring. Maybe eventually it got less intense, until it was just nothing.