“...true love is an irrevocable act - you can only give your heart away once - after that, you give as much as you have left ...”

“...the wet brush of snowflakes was like your kisses everywhere ...”

“...wherever there is society, there is authority and the temptation to disobedience because our individual wills refuse to submit...”

“...no good writing flows from a polluted well - you can write about monsters, but you can't be one...”

“...you think so logically...like a hawk soaring - I feel so chaotically...like a kite without a tail plummeting to earth...”

“...you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought...”

“Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations, That is known as the Children's Hour.”

“In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, a...”

“...If I ever got sloppy and maudlin, it would be for the streets of my childhoodbut no self- respecting writer should ever eulogize a slum...”

“Live your life. Be happy as you can be, let go of the things that don't matter, and fight.”

“He lowered his eyes to his dad's face. There was fear there. Fear. When your dad was frightened, there was something to be frightened about.”

“Mum is a perfectionist and Dad is a pedant and that was partly why their marriage didn't work so well, Elsa figures. Because a perfectionist and a pedant are two very different things.”