There's stories and then there's stories. The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you've heard them, … - Charles de Lint

From the first time he’d met her, he’d sensed an air of contradiction about her. She was very much a woman, but still retained a waiflike quality. She could be brash, and at times deliberately suggestive, yet she was painfully shy. She was incredibly easy to get along with, yet she had few friends. She was a talented artist in her own right, but so self-conscious about her work that she rarely completed a piece and preferred to work with other people’s art and ideas...

What I’ve got to talk about, I don’t think a priest wants to hear. What does a priest know or care about secular concerns? All they want to talk about is God. All they want to hear is a tidy list of sins so that they can prescribe their penances and get on to the next customer.

The more she tried to recapture the impulse that had set her wanting to put pen to paper, the less it seemed to have ever existed in the first place.