I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.

The idea I pursue is the one that keeps coming back to me. The characters I think about as I'm falling asleep at night or when I'm driving to the grocery store are the one's I wind up writing about.

Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.

Show kindness whenever possible. Show it to the people in front of you, the people coming up behind you, and the people with whom you are running neck and neck. It will vastly improve the quality of your own life, the lives of others, and the state of the world.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.