To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.

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.

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.

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.

If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.

For when Iwaltzed with Chris, I'd made him someone else.

Peter's faith had many a shaking, but it was established upon the truth of his God, upon the person and work and righteousness of Jesus Christ.

Nations consist of individuals. It is for every individual to bring in a different quality - the quality of awakened consciousness - into their lives.

A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at the end, for a pleasant death.

There's something fundamental to the harp that has retained its appeal my whole life. It's an instrument I am just in love with.

Be the measure great or small, let it be honest in every part.

A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.

It is often said that our modern world is incapable of self-government.

The perfect man uses his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing. It regrets nothing. It receives but does not keep.