I worry that we all just sat around, after a while, trying to enjoy a ride that was never meant to be fun.

The knowledge of my depravity is the only thing that makes me special... that I have always always always known, and have never for a moment been able to forget, that there is something terribly wrong with me.

We are so lucky to live here,” he would say, and she couldn’t disagree. They were lucky that the earth had conspired to heap up such startling beauty in one place, and they were lucky that it hadn’t all fallen apart yet in a a geological catastrophe.

I wanted to tell you that I was so sad I felt as if I might be happy, or in love, simply because such powerful feelings can appear the same to the naive. I was mighty with grief, and I thought I should be empowered by it. I thought my hands should shine with a yellow light, and that should I reach out to touch our mother on the head, I would call her back from the place she’d gone.

I used to feel sorry for them, or sad. Not so much any more. Now I wonder what they did, and I know what they did, and all I can think is how all that water is barely enough to cover it up.

When people ask me which I would rather give up, writing or medicine, it’s like being asked which eye I’d prefer to have poked out with a spoon: neither, and please use a fork.

If I showed you what was in my heart," she said, "it would burn you to a cinder. "I've tried to burn you similarly," it said, "but you never even noticed when I opened my chest.

It seemed a marvel to her that any mortal should suffer for lack of love, and yet she had never known a mortal who didn't feel unloved. There was enough love just in this ugly hallway, she thought, that no one should ever feel the lack of it again. She peered at the parents, imagining their hearts like machines, manufacturing surfeit upon surfeit of love for their children, and then wondered how something could be so awesome and so utterly powerless.

I want to be a good creature for reasons beyond sharing a life with a good man.

If there’s a magic pony in the story, chances are I’ll read it.