Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

I closed my eyes and immediately I pictured Brooklyn’s full lips parted on a moan, her eyes glassy and her pupils dilated, her cheeks flushed and her body…her smoking body bared only for me.

Hogsmeade looked like a Christmas card

Be true to who you are and the family name you bare.

I'm from a little town called Settle in North Yorkshire, so it's amazing that I get to travel everyday and I get to see such crazy sh*t everyday.

I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia

I don't believe other people are ever as foolishly excited as I am while I'm working. How could they be? Writers would have to live in trees.

I inscribe three lines, hush hush hush, into my skin. Ghosts trickle out.

When you have a choice, choose happy!

Why do I write? I guess that's been asked of every writer. I don't know. It isn't any massive compulsion.

What if we have more of the rough file, if we have less rust! Afflictions carry away nothing but the dross of sin.