"Steve and I had talked it over for hours this morning, before the children got up. I was supposed to calm down more, to let the children misbehave. 'Just let them be kids,' Steve had told me again and again. 'Let them break stuff. They can't help it, so don't expect them to be other than they are.'"
"...I like to draw; I was good at it. I had a prodigious grasp of perspective that let me render things photographically with devilish ease. I was like those autistic wunderkinds ... Only I wasn't autistic..."
"I started writing stories at about eight or nine years of age, as soon as I could reasonably put pen to paper. I'd be frustrated that books I read would end, so I'd pick up and write new endings, or sequels..."
"I started writing stories at about eight or nine years of age, as soon as I could reasonably put pen to paper. I'd be frustrated that books I read would end, so I'd pick up and write new endings, or sequels. When I was nine, I read Jack London and realized that that was what I wanted to do with my life. No. More than that, I believed I could do it. And so I was soon making up my own adventures on the page. Of course, looking back, the whole thing seems absolutely improbable, and I can't help but wonder what it is in us that defies commonsense and says, instead, 'You can do this'."
"...I remembered many so-called do's and don'ts of resumes, but in reality, I'm not sure any truly applied in real life experience. Still, what do I know, I'm not sure I ever made it past a human resources department in my life to get on to the next stage in the hierarchical interviewing process, forget about actually getting the job."
"The gods had been sick for a long time. The people could not watch their gods being ill. They packed the few things they had left into bags and began to walk away."