That's the difference between you and Greta. She has better things to do. She gets involved in clubs, activities. She has friends. But you? You slump around in that room of yours--

Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.

My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.

I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.

You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.

It's hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another.

It's the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven't done everything they want to do. They think they haven't had enough time. They feel they've been shortchanged.

I suppose I'm in that very small group of people who are not waiting for their own story to unfold. If my life was a film, I'd have walked out by now.

But you don't know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then . . . and then it was just me.

...I felt the wall between the world of secrets and the real world start to collapse. I felt the girls from the portrait becoming us and us becoming them...

No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way.

I'm passionate about learning. I'm passionate about life.

The main ingredient of the first quantum revolution, wave-particle duality, has led to inventions such as the transistor and the laser that are at the root of the information society.

My very first magazine cover was the National Enquirer.

I am suing Lord Beaverbrook for libel and hope for some lovely tax-free money in damages. He has very conveniently told some lies about me.

God doesn't want his people to go second-class.

Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.

I'll watch any show on the History Channel.

It takes a level of creative depression to hear 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' and weep.

One of my first jobs was at the Boston Globe. I worked in the sports department six months a year. When I was ready to graduate, the sports editor gave me a job as a schoolboy sports writer.