Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.

In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.

We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.

The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.

At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...

Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason.

When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, "Buffeted but not broken.

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade.

There's one advantage to being 102. There's no peer pressure.

Keep in mind that whenever you are in a crisis, you are in the midst of danger as well as opportunity.

Every woman in America has a French dream in her head, especially a Parisian one.

I realise few people get to live the life they always wanted, but I'm so neurotic, I don't really think about it. I'm too busy thinking, 'I hope I don't screw up my next scene.

Never in my short career, I've never had that experience where I wasn't sure if I was acting or if it was real.

It is pleasant, when the sea runs high, to view from land the great distress of another.

You are stronger than me," Asa says. "And in bravery and strength, there is a kind of beauty.

My indulgences are Skittles and rum raisin ice cream.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.