I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.

For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.

Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.

When you were a little girl, Madam.....was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?

No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.

The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart.