Their friendship was more important than any relationship. Guys would come and go; girlfriends were forever.

I am such a Pacific Northwest girl.

Finding your passion isn't just about careers and money. It's about finding your authentic self. The one you've buried beneath other people's needs.

Maybe time didn't heal wounds exactly, but it gave you a kind of armor, or a new perspective. A way to remember with a smile instead of a sob.

And no one drank just one shot of tequila.

And maybe that was how it was supposed to be...Joy and sadness were part of the package; the trick, perhaps,was to let yourself feel all of it, but to hold on to the joy just a little more tightly.

A daughter without her mother is a woman broken. It is a loss that turns to arthritis and settles deep into her bones.

Memories are who we are. In the end, that's all the luggage you take with you. Love and Memories are what last.

That was what a best friend did: hold up a mirror and show you your heart.

What I know now about life is this: your mother is a part of everything you do and everything you are.

From the first time we met, we knew everything that mattered about each other, didn't we? We just knew. I guess that's what best friends are: parts of each other.

...there were only fifteen thousand polar bears in the world, and five billion of me. To let one of them devour my all-too-common flesh would, if only slightly, help adjust the grievous imbalance.

The family - that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.

The Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians.

Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life.

Yao Ming is the best thing to happen to the NBA in a long time. He is just a beautiful person inside and out. The vision, the creativity, the gentleness of spirit … he has it all.

Life breaks us all but in the end we are stronger in the broken places.

The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.

Past the village flowed the river, like time, like life itself, waiting for the swimmer to come again on his way to the climax of his adventurous life, and to the end for which he had been made.

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand, For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee