I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.

Some of the most important lessons I've learned have been from stumbling, and I am deeply grateful that my parents allowed me to fight my own battles.

You realize that these accidental decisions you make about changing jobs, about moving into an apartment where you make new friends and confidants, about going to one city over another, that sometimes they're completely arbitrary decisions that you haven't put as much thought into as perhaps you should have, and yet they change the course of your whole life.

[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.