And I don’t just mean that they change you. A lot of people can change you – the first kid who called you a name, the first teacher who said you were smart, the first person who crowned you best friend. It’s the change you remember, the firsts and what they meant, not really the people.
Live in the present. Take care of the relationships in front of you now. Most friendships have a natural life, and when they’ve lived that out, you’ll know.
I know I shouldn’t say this – I know it as surely as I know the earth is round and beats are evil – and yet here it comes: “It’s not too late to change your mind.
When you go to high school, and you’re trying to figure yourself out, sometimes it takes doing things that you don’t like in order to figure out what you don’t like. But it’s important to maintain your sense of self throughout the journey.
That’s how life feels to me. Everyone is doing it; everyone knows how. To live and be who they are and find a place, find a moment. I’m still waiting.
Because love, love never finishes.
The kind of life I want is to be a person who would get a personal note every day.
I had them all fooled into believing I was normal and well-adjusted, a rock of sensibility who could always be counted on to have a positive attitude.
My whole life has been one big broken promise.
I have no desire to go back to San Francisco.
Everyone has an identity crisis when they are 16 or 17 years old.
My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.
I never had a connection like that to anyone, where every day you think about what you’ll tell them and you wonder what they’re doing, and you know they’re wondering what you’re doing.
It’s a jagged thing in my throat, how much I miss her.
He felt it too, the air between us, the invisible lines that something or someone had drawn to connect us. That’s the way I remember it.
It’s just so out of control. Life, I mean. The way it flies off in all these different directions without your permission.
I didn’t ‘decide’ to write YA, per se. But every time I thought of a story, it featured characters 15, 16, 17.
I don’t like to do too much psychological research because it might turn a character into a patchwork.
I remember being in high school and listening to Vivaldi’s ‘Winter’ and being so overwhelmed with emotion.
I grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s. We were part of a church that belonged to the California Jesus movement.