I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real.... Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.

They weren't true stories; they were better than that.

The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her - she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don't.

Love is worth the sum of itself, and nothing more.

But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God's glory comes to us from His will alone.

That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.

Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" was extremely important to me.