Some stories won't have a happy ending, but there's always hope that the next one will. Hope is everything. Even when there's nothing else. Especially when there's nothing else.

Dad thinks I'm ready to fly around the country as the Ambassador of Hope, but Mom thinks I'm a frail little bird with broken wings.

Hope is made of air, and wishes. An empty box wrapped in shiny paper.

My father is using me as a message of hope. My sister is using me as a message of fear.I don't want to be used by anybody.

Do it double, because some can't do it at all.

Something contracts in my chest. The air shifts, grows heavy and dense as mud. Alexa twists her hair around her finger and whispers, "Didn't you even try to escape, Charlotte?

I say to my sister, "I thought you were doing the things in our Dream Book. I was sure of it." "Why would I do that stuff without you?" "Because you could.""Well, you were wrong.

As a society we should try to never inhibit another person's creativity. In people like myself, it's all we have.

Never stop growing. The world's tallest redwood trees were all once little nuts, that kept growing regardless of weather, trials or tribulations.

If at first you don't succeed... so much for skydiving.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first?

I enjoy the cleaning up - something about the getting of things in order for winter - making the garden secure - a battening down of hatches perhaps... It just feels right.

An indictment is not a conviction.

Feelings and emotions are only the creation of mind and energy. Love is the creation of the soul.

The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.

Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.