All the best writers take risks, offend people often and say fuck you to the critics.

— Carla H. Krueger

Are there not times, Ridley, when you yourself wish only to hear the best in people – and not to be dragged downwards into the underworld we all regularly inhabit?

— Carla H. Krueger

A silence absorbed them both – a lack of sound so potent it blackened the place with something richer than hate.

— Carla H. Krueger

BEA stared at the pencils as if they were enemies.

— Carla H. Krueger

Beyond the boundaries of herself, her parents and the enclosing garden walls, were open fields and other waiting places she still knew nothing of – lies of the land, perhaps. What Katie did know is that out there in the lonely nowhere was a special quietness, free of the sounds of daytime birds or foxes at night – and that it was a quietness she might like to listen to one day.

— Carla H. Krueger

Blank walls are a shared canvas and we're all artists.

— Carla H. Krueger

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.

— Carla H. Krueger

Books are readable drugs.

— Carla H. Krueger

Bravery isn't brandishing a sword. It's standing your moral ground and letting others try their best to take you down.

— Carla H. Krueger

Dawn cackles as she guides me through the all-glass porch. Thinner, paler Ran shuffles about behind Dawn, watching as I slip my boots off. Although she tries to hide her hands, her fingers flicker nervously. I place my boots neatly on the floor of the porch beside the other pairs in the shadows under the coats. Music drifts through to us from a distant room – it’s the Beach Boys’ California Dreamin’. Dawn looks at me and I smile – they’ve put the record on for me. Dawn nods along happily. ‘Hear you’re a surfer boy!’ she says, and she mimics riding a wave.

— Carla H. Krueger