Here's A Little Tip For You. If

What I Am Telling You, Before You Begin My Story, Is This -- Two Things: I Crave Truth. And I Lie.

The Girls I Dream Of Are The Gentle Ones, Wistful By High Windows Or Singing Sweet Old Songs At A Piano, Long Hair Drifting, Tender As Apple Blossom. But A Girl Who Goes Into Battle Beside You And Keeps Your Back Is A Different Thing, A Thing To Make You Shiver. Think Of The First Time You Slept With Someone, Or The First Time You Fell In Love: That Blinding Explosion That Left You Cracking To The Fingertips With Electricity, Initiated And Transformed. I Tell You That Was Nothing, Nothing At All, Beside The Power Of Putting Your Lives, Simply And Daily, Into Each Other's Hands.

I Am Not Good At Noticing When I'm Happy, Except In Retrospect.

I Had Learned Early To Assume Something Dark And Lethal Hidden At The Heart Of Anything I Loved. When I Couldn't Find It, I Responded, Bewildered And Wary, In The Only Way I Knew How: By Planting It There Myself.

If You Rewrite A Paragraph Fifty Times And Forty-nine Of Them Are Terrible, That's Fine; You Only Need To Get It Right Once.