When there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything.
You carry your past with you even if you don’t remember any of it.
Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.
Love yourself and your friends unconditionally .
The distinction has blurred between young adult and adult books. Some of the teen books have become more sophisticated.
I don’t have the life of a famous person. But I do feel like I’ve been able to connect with a lot of people.
A tree is such a rich metaphor in a million beautiful ways. You can consider a tree growing and consider its connectedness to all things above and under the ground.
As much as I’m drawn to writing about teenage girls, I like the idea of having the freedom to branch out and write about different ages, for different ages.
Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.
I agree that a love of reading is a great gift for a parent to pass on to his or her child.
It’s so much easier to have no expectations than to have big ones.
My household is, in a nice way, very busy.
To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.
When I turned fifteen, I remember my father gave me a credit card which I was allowed to use for two things: emergencies and books.
Gestating characters feels something like the mental equivalent of gestating a baby. In both cases, to create them you lose yourself. Or at least you reshape yourself to encompass them.
Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you’d recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.
At the worst possible moment, the most painful, darkest moment when you can’t take it anymore and you are afraid, that is when a feeling of peace and comfort will come over you, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever felt.
Someday when you’re twenty, maybe, I’ll see you again. You’ll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what? I’ll see you and I’ll pray you want me still.
Everyone is fragile. Everything beautiful is fragile.
The most haunting thing was not that he didn’t love her anymore. She could have accepted that eventually. The most haunting thing was that he did. He loved her from afar. He loved her in a way that was preserved in time, that couldn’t be sullied. And she tended it in her careful, curatorial way.