We are all joined in a circle of stories.

“I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.”

“A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it.”

Technically a memoir, 'The Woman Warrior' becomes almost magical through its inclusion of folk tales, dreams, and revisions.

I don't actually watch that much TV, but I was obsessed with 'Dawson's Creek' growing up. And 'Freaks and Geeks.' And '8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter.'

You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.

Some like to sleep. Some like to read late into the night without catching a wink. In a world of dreamers, both are essential.

A nonhuman animal had better have a good lawyer. In 1508, Bartholomé Chassenée earned fame and fortune for his eloquent representation of the rats of his French province. These rats had been charged with destroying the barley crop and also with ignoring the court order to appear and defend themselves. Bartholomé Chassenée argued successfully that the rats hadn't come because the court had failed to provide reasonable protection from the village cats along the route.

We don't choose whom we love,” he told Maura, so gently that she knew he knew. If she wasn't going to be loved in return, she would have liked not to be pitied for it. She got neither of these wishes. “But people have this advantage over swans, to put their unwise loves aside and love another. Not me. I'm too much swan for that.

Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.