When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.

She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.

I admire the linear and decisive way a certain kind of man thinks, to my curlicue boundless overthinking.

Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.

For whatever reason, various outlets and individuals are committed to making the world think that young girls don't talk or care about feminism anymore, that it's totally over. But it's not.

I like dressing up for dates and dissecting a dinner conversation with a new guy to determine if he might be The One.

We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway.

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.

She thought about him all the time - not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear.

Only your life's work, driven by passion, will last forever.

Perhaps as writers, we too should embrace the concept of wabi-sabi:

It’s not how you start that’s important, but how well you finish!

Many a treasure besides Ali Baba's is unlocked with a verbal key.

The only thing I never have unless I'm pregnant is heartburn.

Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by whichthey have once won office.

Colombia is a different country today. The state is now present in every single corner, the drug lords are in jail or dead. So we have the means to guarantee the security of FARC politicians.

I'm not suspicious, I'm just careful.

Gnosis is lived upon facts, withers away in abstractions, and is difficult to find even in the noblest of thoughts.

No one deserves to be whipped like an animal.