"He knew even at an early age of seven, how dangerous it was for someone like him to have hope. He knows how to have no expectations. He can completely control not just what he wants, but what he needs."

"He carried so much suffering that it radiated out in waves. Sorrow is like that: whenever a person runs, it comes after him; it leaves an endless trail of pain."

"She thinks of the way angels arrive, when you lease expect them, when the road is dark, when you're bleeding and alone and hopeless, when you're sleeping in a basement, convinced that no one knows you're there."

"I really feel like the gift is also the curse. It's always half-and-half. Whatever brings you the most joy will also probably bring you the most pain. Always a price to pay."

"If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face. My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am."

"When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night."

"Don't make me sit through reality."

"Mean people are meaningless."

"I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life."

"They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I'm interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women's stories are all kind of combined."

"Ironically, now that my children are older and gone quite a bit, I find it harder to work when they're not around. Too much free time!"

"James had a theory about caged birds, one he hoped to prove when he became a scientist someday. He believed that all birds that had their freedom taken from them eventually lost their voices. Once that happened, they could never find their true song."

"Pain was something to get used to, to inure yourself against. I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse."

"In my memories I have set my life in Brooklyn between pieces of glass, separate from my current existence, and this has enabled me to move forward. The past cannot tie me in knots, nor can it cause me to drown. And yet what is stored in glass belongs to me still. Each piece is a part of me: the hummingbirds, the locked doors, Mr. Morris in the yard, the pear tree, the woman covered by bees, and you. Especially you."

"Who I am to talk? I dream of rain."

"I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told."

"From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library..."

"What was a rose but the living proof of desire, the single best evidence of human longing and earthly devotion. but desire could be twisted,after all, and Jealousy was the name of the rose that did well in arid souls."

"I could hardly get a boy to look at me. All right, they'd look, they'd even take me out, but no one asked for a second date. I was too nasty, a real wise guy, and all the boys could tell what my rotten disposition was. Deep down, I wanted a commitment with a capital C. To get anywhere with me, a boy would have to sign his undying loyalty with his own blood."

"It's still horrible to wish the worst on anyone. I'm sure she had her reasons. Maybe people hurt her feelings, the same way I was hurt. A single word can feel like a rock being thrown at you."

"There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can."

"She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all."

"And so many orchards circled the village that on some crisp October afternoons the whole wold smelled like pie."

"The story became a cloud, and the cloud a sheet of rain, and rain fell throughout the empire."

"I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?"

"I KNEW I MUST do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined."

"But now I understood that, although words were God's first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven."

"I want the difficult stories, the ones that aren't easy to believe, the twisted ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that need telling most of all."

"That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness."

"Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws."

"I thought he knew me better than most...Then one nigh Jack brought me flowers, a handful of fading daisies he'd picked up at a farm stand, but flowers all the same. That was the end; that was how he ruined everything."

"I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn't see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn't care that I was dying until I actually was."

"She can feel his blood, just beneath his skin; when he breathes, the air fills with smoke. He's like a dragon, ancient and fearless."

"You want me to lie to you?" said McKay. I shrugged. Why not? I didn't mind lies."

"There seemed to be handfuls of stars tossed right above the rooftops in Haddan, keeping the town still alight at midnight."

"He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say."

"I head a bitterness that hadn't been there before. Something was changing inside him. He'd had enough of following the rules."

"She'd bought a blue notebook in the pharmacy to write down her aunt's remedies. Star tulip to understand dreams, bee balm for a restful sleep, black mustard seed to repel nightmares, remedies that used essential oils of almond or apricot or myrrh from thorn trees in the desert. Two eggs, which must never be eaten, set under a bed to clean a tainted atmosphere. Vinegar as a cleansing bath. Garlic, salt, and rosemary, the ancient spell to cast away evil."

"Never to rush something I was creating, but instead let it come into being as if it had a soul of it's own."

"Love was never a mistake,even when it wasn't returned."

"I think growing up is difficult and it's a process that I'm always interested in, with kids and adults, they are often on two different universes."

"Helplessness and anger make for predictable behavior: Children are certain to shove each other and pull hair, teenagers will call each other names and cry, and grown women who are sisters will say words so cruel that each syllable will take on the form of a snake, although such a snake often circles in on itself to eat its own tail once the words are said aloud."

"When I walk, I walk with you. Where I go, you're with me always."

"It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too."

"I don't think I make much of a distinction between the 'real' and the 'fantastic.' They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I'm concerned."

"When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure."

"Time wasn't the same anymore. Doors were slamming shut before we even knew they'd been opened. Good fortune can take forever to get to you, but as it turns out, sorrow is as quick as a shot."

"Books may well be the only true magic."

"Still anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be."

"Although my father had never been there, I came to believe I would someday see that city for him."