I read everything of Ray Bradbury when I was 12 or 13, and I think that's the most effective time to read Bradbury. He built such a moral world, where you have to make decisions and grow up.

When I looked at her, she appeared to be a different person from the one I'd known... She had rewritten everything, our history together, our friendship. Now I was the girl who'd stolen Andres; the girl who'd lied to her about who I was. Therefore, she owned me nothing.

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

Young people believe that regret is something you will never feel if you simply do as you please, but sometimes it is a matter of degree.

I feel as if when you love a book it becomes a part of you whether you have it on your shelves or not.

I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life

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.