Never. Never ask for what ought to be offered.

Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.

Fading light buttered the ridges until shadows licked them clean and they were lost to nightfall.

The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.

He unscrewed the lid, set it on the dash, snorted from the bottle twice, banged the steering wheel, and said, 'You got to be ready to die every day - then you got a chance.'

Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellowed dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again.

I said shut up once already, with my mouth.

This is how sudden things happened that haunted forever.

The opening novel of the 'Bayou Trilogy' was the first one I finished.

I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.

Pine trees with low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.

The heart is resilient and forgiving, it is the mind that causes us stress.

This time like all times is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.

War is the science of destruction.

My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.

No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has; the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark.

It's just as important to marry the right life as the right person.

~[My son] is at that age now where he's so loving and says the sweetest things to me. Of course, I still get karate chops and all those other sort of things, too.~

When you work really hard for something for a long time it's almost impossible to believe that it's coming true.

Depression scares people off. It makes me laugh that it has that kind of effect.

A reporter is no better than his source of information.