You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes. - Michael Cunningham

It’s better, really, to go out in a blaze. That’s why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire.

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they have been given with good intentions , because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.