If you think I'm annoying and preachy now, you should have known me in grade school.

Once a year, she remembers that she is insignificant. Then she forgets agains, because more than she is insignificant, she is forgetful.

Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?

He wanted to fly in lightweight contraptions with her.

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.

Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.

Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.