An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

Keep hoping in tomorrow & one day tomorrow shall manifest your dreams.

It's not respectable, ' she said. And when people say that, it's no useanyone's saying anything.

He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.

The main characteristics of romantic love are craving: an intense craving to be with a particular person, not just sexually, but emotionally.

I am going to turn over a new life and am going to be a very good girl and be obedient to Isa Keith, here there is plenty of gooseberries which makes my teeth watter.

I'm a half-demon princess. Sure. What's so hard to grasp about that?

In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, "the romance." The English is "novel" - something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form.

The truth is that she told me she couldn't love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet. I made myself forget. I don't know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.

Some people are a natural administrator. They actually enjoy doing it. I find it a chore. I'm not a details person. I go for the big sweep.

She hated their new nickname. It made them sound like deranged Barbie dolls.