first-sentence

If you want vampires and werewolves, faeries, fallen angels or zombies, you won't find them here. I know a real-life monster.

The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.

Deep down, Story Easton knew what would happen if she attempted to off herself__he would fail It was a matter of probability. This was not a new thing, failure. She was, had always been, a failure of fairy-tale proportion. Quitting wasn__ Story__ problem. She had tried, really tried, lots of things during different stages of her life__irl Scours, the viola, gardening, Tommy Andres from senior year American Lit__ut zero cookie sales, four broken strings, two withered azalea bushes, and one uniquely humiliating breakup later, Story still had not tasted success, and with a shriveled-up writing career as her latest disappointment, she realized no magic slippers or fairy dust was going to rescue her from her Anti-Midas Touch. No Happily Ever After was coming. So she had learned to find a certain comfort in failure. In addition to her own screw-ups, others_ mistakes became cozy blankets to cuddle, and she snuggled up to famous failures like most people embrace triumph. The Battle of Little Bighorn__ thing of beauty. The Bay of Pigs__elicious debacle. The Y2K Bug__orgeously disappointing fuck-up. Geraldo__ anti-climactic Al Capone exhumation__ops! Jaws III__eaven on film. Tattooed eyeliner__yelids everywhere, revolting. Really revolting. Fat-free potato chips__ood Lord, makes anyone feel successful.

There once was a woman named Story Easton who couldn't decide if she should kill herself, or eat a double cheeseburger.

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide__t was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese__he two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

I was about thirteen when I started letting boys feel me up.

On top of everything else, Boobie's got the clap.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.

One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone. There. Gone. No 'poof.' No flash of light. No explosion.

In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jeronimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and he was about to hang himself.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Women have always been spies.

Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe.

If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face. My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.