“Upon learning that Louisa May Alcott spent more than a decade moonlighting as a sordid, heady mix of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Brontë, I dove eagerly into this secret canon.”

“That’s how I lived through--no--I survived that harsh winter in solitary confinement. It gave me the mental strength to push forward through any situation I faced in the future.”

“I realize that my experiences of Gaelic are like the view from the door of my basement apartment: a sliver of sky and the row houses across the street. I can never see the whole world that way. Yet Gaelic gives me many glimpses into worlds just beyond.”

“So, I fashion from her missteps a different kind of compass, revealing where a teller of stories should tread compassionately, inquisitively, conscientiously—or not at all.”

“I wondered if I was the one who had taken a funny turn. One can take a turn for the worse or the better. But taking a “funny turn” is ambiguous and enigmatic. I wondered what the original Italian phrasing was for this.”

“His compositions reinvented classical music, perhaps because he no longer could hear what others were creating.”