My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.

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.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

[Present over perfect is] about rejecting the myth that every day is a new opportunity to prove our worth, and about the truth that our worth is inherent, given by God, not earned by our hustling.

The greatest motivation in life is the one that's deeply rooted in one's passion.

The only competition in art is the search for truth. No matter who gets there first, we all win.

Your highest potential is in your highest love.

The older I get the greater power I seem to have to help the world I am like a snowball-the further I am rolled the more I gain.

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

We have to be that wedge that drives the question and asks the hard questions

I think it's a combination of my peoples that I grew up under, places that I hung out is what contributed to where I'm at now.

My grandfather, a devout Christian, had the gift of healing.