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

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.

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.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

Imagined happiness is still happiness.

Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

For me, it's not about masochism to talk about death. For me, it's about observing life through death, from the last point of it.

I felt all the ways in which this world seemed so, so enormous--the height of the trees, the hush and tick of the forest, the shift of the sunlight and shadows--but also so, so removed.

We're not sane enough yet to enter space until we learn to live together in peace on Earth.

"Why doesn't the fellow who says, "I'm no speechmaker," let it go at that instead of giving a demonstration? "

Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more.

If books were Persian carpets, one would not look only at the outer side. because it is the stitch that makes a carpet wear, gives it its life and bloom.

The more that I know of politics, the more it makes me realize that being a politician is largely useless.

She fell into a long sleep and dreamed the dreams of the Dream Tree.