Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.

It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story.

If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

I travel not only for the passion and madness and desire of movement, but because travel, like bread and water and air, becomes necessary to a life fully dreamed and lived.

Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.

Tears are not a mark of weakness.They just prove that your heart is alive.

Disappointments are often my greatest motivation.

They’re evacuating the younger kids and everyone’s meeting in the Great Hall to get organized. We’re fighting.

The whole world has American dreams. This country has people from all parts of the world. We have Irish who live here, we have Brazilians.

Betray mean terror of ridicule, thou shalt find fools enough to mock thee; but answer thou their language with contempt, and the scoffers will lick thy feet.

Your need to talk does not create in me a need to listen.

First of all, I always see the sun! The way I want to identify myself and others is with halos here and there halos, movements of color. And that, I believe, is rhythm.

I'm sure that's every adolescent's complaint about their home town. When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.