Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.

It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story.

If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

If we can be Glad .........But we choose to be Sad, we are MAD! ! !- RVM

People want to be told what to do so badly that they'll listen to anyone.[Written by Andre and Maria Jacquemetton]

The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, "Are we being good ancestors?

One boy is more trouble than a dozen girls.

If people have a basic understanding of right from wrong, possess a strong desire to better themselves and persist in there cause, they can break the chain of any negative environment.

This is our world and we need the same things to survive. If I'm making my life better and the circumstances of your life worse, that's terrible because in the end it will affect me, too.

I think one of the reasons musicians keep doing what they do and writers keep doing what they do, is that we're totally unsuited for anything else. And I for one am much too lazy.

Because now, I didn't care what they thought. It wasn't new, this realization that I would never be like them. What was different now was that I was glad. Macy page 199

Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.

So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.