He was golden and beautiful as a sunset.
It’s a good thing babies don’t give you a lot of time to think. You fall in love with them and when you realize how much they love you back, life is very simple.
It was one of those perfect fall days when the air is cool enough to wake you up but the sun is also kissing your face.
The real Mary Poppins got lost when Hollywood turned her into a cream puff.
There’s something almost adolescent about Whitman’s paean to everything that was and remains good about America.
I never wanted Mary Poppins to be my nanny. I wanted to be her when I grew up.
My early childhood was spent in Newark, New Jersey, but my family moved to Denver when I was 12.
I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn’t get reviewed in any major outlets.
I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying.
Since 1985, I have written about contemporary Jewish practice and the Jewish community.
The Bible – it’s sort of the other person in the room. There’s this book, the reader, and the Bible.
Whatever your relationship is to your sacred tradition in the West, you have some relationship to the Bible if only through the names of the characters.
Biblical names are hot again.
The more I do bookstores, the more people come up to me from church groups. I spoke at Pittsburg State College and had 2 or 3 ministers and book groups from a couple of churches.
In Egypt, I loved the perfume of the lotus. A flower would bloom in the pool at dawn, filling the entire garden with a blue musk so powerful it seemed that even the fish and ducks would swoon. By night, the flower might wither but the perfume lasted. Fainter and fainter, but never quite gone. Even many days later, the lotus remained in the garden. Months would pass and a bee would alight near the spot where the lotus had blossomed, and its essence was released again, momentary but undeniable.
You should always be kind to people, Ava. You never know what sorrows they’re carrying around.
Sometimes friends grow apart. You tell each other everything and you’re sure this is a person you’ll know the rest of your life but then she stops writing or calling, or you realize she’s really not so nice, or she turns into a right-winger.
Even a broken clock is right twice every day.
It took me until I was almost forty before I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.
How did I get to be the woman I am today?” It started in that library, in the reading club. That’s where I started to be my own person.