“I am forever grateful for not knowingWhat would have been. WHAT WILL BE holds none of those bittersweet pangs and it is lit w joy.”

“Never mourn the loss of innocence, because it always brings the much greater gain of wisdom.”

“Emotions are like muscles. Most of them go highly unattended, it's usually the weaker, undefined ones that cause injury to the rest, and there is most certainly memory response in play.”

“Sometimes I feel like one of those sliding tile puzzles. I just get so dang close to what I want to see in the mirror and who I want to be... but then I have to completely jumble up the pieces to t...”

“Just give me a thousand words and you may make your own pictures.”

“Humility and shame have been confused. Humility is knowing that you know nothing for sure and shame is someone having to tell you.”

“But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are ...”

“You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.”

“A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.”

“There will always be reservations, things one must leave out, events one cant explain without handing over a full map of ones life, unfolding it, making clear that all the lines and contours stand ...”

“oYu begin with other people's stories and end up with your own.”

“You begin with other people's stories and end up with your own.”

“There are many different stories to tell. It's never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is a...”

“I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later...”

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, cap...”