The people you save won't celebrate you. They'll gather the wood and cheer while you burn.

I don't believe in miracles, but if the need is great, a girl might make her own miracle.

Did we risk our lives to defend a just society, where guilt must be proven and not assumed? Or are we no better than the oppressive kings from whom our fathers fled?

Like a soldier back from battle you fill my vision. You're a flood, a baptism I'd forgotten, and the force of you leaves me breathless.

The fuzzy boundary lines between different readership ages have always puzzled me, so these days I just write what comes, and assume I can fix the mess later with an editor's help.

And what rules of economy dictate that a boy without a foot is more whole than a girl without a tongue?

I nod. Young love is not always forever. I know.

It's a cold world when no one will touch you.

I have to trust that if a story is strong, it can find its readership, and good editors can steer me well.

A miracle that can never be: your face, your hands, pledged to me.

I always want readers to lose themselves completely in a story and feel something, whatever the book invites them to feel. That experience is the best takeaway any book can offer.

Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.

I like to believe magic is all around us, finding its way into everyday life one miracle at a time.

It is horrible, yet fascinating, this struggle between a set purpose and an utterly exhausted frame.

When you practice reporting for as long as I have, you keep yourself at a distance from True Believers. Either conservatives or liberals or Democrats or Republicans.

No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?

I'm careful with my heart. I don't take crap from no one these days. I put my foot down. Being a woman, you deserve heaven and earth.

The key to winning any general election in the USA is to excite your base and then expand your base - get independent voters and voters who haven't been voting for your party to come to your party.

It is one of the worst things of sentiment that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that what is spoken.

When Bob came through Cincinnati, he wanted a girl singer to be on his show. There was a local contest, and my sister and I entered, but Bob said, Gee, I wouldn't break up the team.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.