"The family dynamics are complex; and as often happens in our own lives, how we view the people close to us, even when they are fictional characters, depends on where we stand in the world at that time."

"Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think. (p59)"

"The lonelier you are, the more you pull away, until humans seem an alien race, with customs and a language you can't begin to understand. (p145)"

"Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away."

"This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed."

"For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town. If a damp spring arrived, if cows in the pasture gave milk that was runny with blood, if a colt died of colic or a baby was born with a red birthmark stamped onto his cheek, everyone believed that fate must have been twisted, at least a little, by those women over on Magnolia Street. It didn't matter what the problem was-lightning, or locusts, or a death by drowning. It didn't matter if the situation could be explained by logic, or science, or plain bad luck. As soon as there was a hint of trouble or the slightest misfortune, people began pointing their fingers and placing blame. Before long they'd convinced themselves that it wasn't safe to walk past the Owens house after dark, and only the most foolish neighbors would dare to peer over the black wrought-iron fence that circled the yard like a snake. (beginning)"

"I never even believed in happiness. I didn't think it existed. Now look at me. I'm ready to believe in just about anything." (p161)"

"I always feel you're writing the book you couldn't find, so you have to write it yourself."

"I've often wondered if I spent too much time inside of books. If perhaps I ended up getting lost in there. I feared that reading, and later writing, stopped me from living a full life in the real world. I still don't know the answer to this, but I'm not sure I would have gotten past being twelve without Ray Bradbury, and I know that imagining the plot for my novel The River King during a lengthy bone scan helped me get through that test. (p 35)"

"Don't forget books. What would life be without them? Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, William Faulkner. Read the greats-they're great for a reason. They know how to chart the human soul. (p 32)"

"During my radiation treatment I read Man's Search for Meaning. People said, Isn't that book depressing? But it wasn't. It was honest...We are all responsible for our actions, and our reactions. We are responsible for how we respond to situations we cannot control. (p 43)"

"I've always believed there is a very thin line that separates readers and writers. You make a leap over that line when there's a book you want to read and you can't find it and you have to write it yourself. (preface)"

"you can't run away by ignoring the truth. Truth follows you; it comes in through open windows and drifts under doors. When it comes to sorrow, no one is immune. (preface)"

"I wrote to remind myself that in the darkest hour the roses still bloom, the stars still come out at night (preface)"

"Write it down. Even if it's a few sentences. Because you won't remember. You think you will never forget, but you will. Write down your life story or a poem. Sometimes shorter is better. Make a list of what all you have loved in this unfair and beautiful world. (p 82)"

"I have no guilt regarding my love of fantasy and science fiction, only pleasure. I grew up reading the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I chuckle over how this “genre” has become mainstream and how time travel, alternative universes and magic are now so everyday. Plus, no one could ever feel guilty about reading writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick."

"(Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today?) All time — Emily Brontë, author of the greatest psychological novel ever written, with the most complex character ever conceived...My favorite novelist working today is our greatest living writer, Toni Morrison. Nothing compares with her lyrical, heart-wrenching, gorgeous prose."

"no book makes me furious. Maybe sad, or lost, or confused, but mostly joy and wonder are the emotions involved. That’s why I prefer books to people."

"In a way, I feel survival is always my subject matter."

"For me, reading and magic always went together...For me, literature and magic have always gone together in terms of subject matter but also in what literature does to a reader – it casts a magic spell."

"(Whom do you consider your literary heroes?) Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily Brontë, Ray Bradbury, all for different reasons, all adored."

"That’s still the best reading experience: falling in love with a book I meet by accident."

"Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen."

"(Have you noticed a change in the industry toward women writers since you began writing?) AH: I don't think women are treated the same as men in anything, so why would they be treated the same in literature? I think that there's a different standard, and it's difficult for women, even though, weirdly, it's women who read the most fiction. I don't know what the right word for it is, but I think that some women writers are not looked at with the same kind of respect or seriousness."

"It's so easy for me—and probably other writers—to write something and think, "This is garbage, I'm throwing it out." But if you give yourself time, you can write your way into the story. So I try not to read it until I have about 50 pages. Then I feel like I have enough distance, and I'm not as highly critical of myself."

"For people who want to be a writer—and maybe this is true for anything you want to be in life—if one person believes in you, that's enough. And my grandmother really believed in me."

"that was kind of the '60s mentality, too—you didn't need to be published, that was mainstream. You just wanted to be an artist and create something."

"I just do the best I can to face what life brings. That’s the secret, you know. That’s the way you change your fate."

"For me—and I think for most writers—you're a reader first and then it just happens. You so love it that you want to be part of it, and you start writing."

"Even though laws have changed we still have so many social constraints and so many rules that we set for ourselves and that society sets for us. It’s very difficult still to be a woman."

"He wondered why it was only when you were at the end of your life that it was possible to view it with honesty and truth."

"That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls. To fight what was wicked, magic and faith were needed. This was what one must turn to when there was no other option."

"Other people’s judgments were meaningless unless you allowed them to mean something."

"I don’t think about rules when I’m writing – that’s the great thing about writing: it’s the one place in my life that I can do whatever I want."

"Know that the only remedy for love is to love more."

"Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity."

"You are the man I admired most of all, Julien would say to him if he could, if they were lying side by side watching the universe expand all around them. (p283)"

"It was a wonder, a message that all things were possible, even in this cruel world. (p215)"

"'Because of this what transpired between them was something they hadn't expected, it was almost as if they had fallen in love in a world where anything could happen and nothing was impossible. (p295)"

"She was finally here, in the place where she had found a future. Still, night after night, the past was with her. (p197)"

"Two brilliant colleagues who were now wearing rags, carrying their children on their backs, thinking of starvation rather than algebra. (p116)"

"the Germans had researched her family; they were very thorough after all, and they knew things about her grandfather that she herself didn't know. She would think of this in the camp they took her to after she was arrested, how little she knew about the person she loved most in this world. (p214)"

"Every now and then a crow would soar past with a gold ring or coat button in its beak, a shiny souvenir of murder. (p298)"

"This is how it began, out of water, out of clay, out of air, when it was not expected, when it should have never happened, when no one else understood who she was. (p113)"

"What they held in common was their aloneness, and in time, thrown together, with no world other than their own, they grew close. (p103)"

"Human lives were like quicksilver; let go and they vanished. But not this time. (p319)"

"He realized how little he knew of this world, but he knew this: If you could love someone, you possessed a soul. (p348)"

""We must hope for the best," she told the girl. She might have said more if she'd had the freedom to speak her mind, but in her formation she hadn't been given the choice to confide what she felt. If she could do so there would have been much she would have said: how green the verdant countryside was, how bright the light had become, how grateful she was to her maker each and every minute, how the birds in the treetops could be heard even when the train rumbled by, how the first of the season's bees hit against the windowpanes as if searching for flowers, how absolutely marvelous it was to be in the world. (p72)"

"If you are loved, you never lose the person who loved you. You carry them with you all your life."