Piece by piece living is hard to do. It may even feel like the hardest thing. But it has this going for it: you never need to know what it is you're carrying on your shoulders.

Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.

It's important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.

The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.

In terms of the secrets that imbue and underlie Fall on Your Knees, they were as much of a mystery to me as I was creating the story as they are to the readers.

Materia had been just six when they docked in Sydney Harbour and her father said, 'Look. This is the New World. Anything is possible here.' She's been too young to realize that he was talking to her brother.

There are some stories you can't hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That's one reliable way of understanding time.