Young Sally Owens: He will hear my call a mile away. He will whistle my favorite song. He can ride a pony backwards. Young Gillian Owens: What are you doing? Young Sally Owens: Summoning up a true love spell called Amas Veritas. He can flip pancakes in the air. He'll be marvelously kind. And his favorite shape will be a star. And he'll have one green eye and one blue. Young Gillian Owens: Thought you never wanted to fall in love. Young Sally Owens: That's the point. The guy I dreamed of doesn't exist. And if he doesn't exist I'll never die of a broken heart.

I wept to think that life went on even when so much had been lost, that rain still fell and myrtle grew between the rocks.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written

Sally...can no longer think of love as a reality, or even as a possibility, however remote.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist

Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes are brutal, unforgiving things. They burn your tongue the moment they're spoken and you can never take them back.

He has the ability to catch someone by the way that he looks at her, and make her wish he would go on looking.