No barrier was strong enough to keep out the movement of time.

My mother, Abra, had taught me that all people are made from the same dust. When our days here are gone, all men and women enter the same garden.

Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

Do you ever just put your arms out and just spin and spin and spin? Well, that's what love is like; everything inside of you tells you to stop before you fall, but for some reason you just keep going.

When I write for teens, I feel I can cut through everything and get to the bare bones. I can get straight into the emotional world of the character.

I'm at the point where going forward is easier than going back.

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.