Show me all your sides, dive with me to your deepest points and guide me to your Everest. I'll always adore the way you are yourself, so don't tell me being sad makes me unhappy or love you less.

[E]verywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.

Even the memory of cradling her in my arms is pure euphoria. And all that I ask out of life is that it be constant and unending euphoria.

It was a rather cute reaction, but as I wasn’t a part of any of that, I didn't give a damn.

And then what did you do, Lord Oliver?' Karl's eight-year-old daughter gazed up at him in awe, as though this were the best story she had ever heard.

I feel more human when I compare the cuteness of a lizard to a newborn child's sweetness. Both are God's creations filled with precious innocence.

It was weird, ’cause there we were in Italy listening to people singing in German. The music was nice, though, and there was this guy dressed up like a parrot. If you’d asked me a year ago to guess what opera was like, I’d never have guessed it had guys dressed as parrots. I might’ve wanted to go and see some sooner if I’d known. It was a sweet story, ’cause he met this girl who was dressed as a parrot too, and they got off together.

All right. Talk to me darlin'. You're not insane. A little crazy, but not insane. And this...Everything you've gotten...In the last few days...Do you know how many people would kill for this?'But...

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother thinks was merely cute may have been lethal.