Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough. - John Irving

...but I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar — you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace. My cousins were both small-towners and outsiders; they had not grown up with Own Meany, who was so strange to them that he inspired awe - yet they were no more likely to fall upon him, or to devise ways to torture him, than it was likely for a herd of cattle to attack a cat.

A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.'

I you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.