Quotes from Elizabeth Cody Kimmel

In reality there is no normal. Normal is something people have agreed to invent so we have something to compare ourselves to. Normal should be the least of your worries.

Frankly, I'm guessing that before getting to my house today, Shoshanna had thought the Hoover Dam was some kind of vacuum cleaner attachment.

There should be a phone service, I thought, something like 1-800-MEDIUM-1.Where an automated voice would direct you. Press one if an object in your home is levitating. Press two if there is ectoplasm oozing out of your walls. Press three if spirits are disrupting your cable service. Press four if you've inherited your mother's psychic abilities.

Why not just tell my parents the boarding school thing wasn't working out, and go home? That offer had been on the table from the beginning, after all. I could live at home forever, growing white-haired and teaching piano and taking in stray cats until the neighborhood children started weaving tales of my tragic past and my story was adapted for Lifetime Television.

build-your-own-telescope

She cleared her throat. "They discovered, to their eeeeever-last-ing horr-or"—here Mrs. Henscher's voice rose to such a shriek that Norman imagined fine crystal shattering halfway across the county—"an eeeeevil witch among them!" Now she began to wave her arms

Now, Norman was used to all kinds of strange, but this was something he had never experienced before. As he stood staring at the script, the paper turned yellow and parchmentlike

The only sound was Alvin's snorts of laughter. "Dude, you're the only one standing there! Who are you talking to, the vegetable dip?" he shouted before his grandmother shushed him.

Norman certainly thought so. There was something there, but it didn't have a dead-thing vibe. And Neil had heard it, too, so whatever was going on, Norman knew it didn't involve the supernatural. Suddenly, something leaped out in front of them. "You. Boy. You know who I am?" it wheezed. Norman and Neil both took a step backward. A hulking man stood hunched over with age and

You're not a frog; you're a toad

Well, that's what they said. (It could have just been indigestion, though.)

abandoned since the sudden disappearance of the hamster last Tuesday) and the pink plastic pig that had been sliced down the middle

Brown or green in color, they are toothless and sometimes warty in appearance