A single girl who needs nobody makes people uncomfortable, and my mom is right in this, appearance is everything, and appearing to have no one is like swimming alone in the middle of the ocean with a flesh wound.

You know what they say - sleep is the mother's drug of choice, but like heroin, only the very rich and the very poor can afford it.

By investing others with the power to dictate who you are, you rob yourself of an opportunity to truly grow. You shortchange yourself by devaluing the experiences and knowledge you've banked, all those things that have been making you, you.

In Quiet Dell, Phillips mesmerizingly spins together fact and fiction, vividly imagining the circumstances leading to their deaths, and sets a young female reporter on the case to solve it.

Write to exhaustion so that you can no longer manage to avoid writing the truth.

The stories in Dawn Raffel's astonishing Further Adventures in the Restless Universe as as sharp and bright as stars.

I focus best and am most productive when I’m working in a friend’s empty apartment. It’s hard for me to work at home. Too easy to procrastinate online, too easy to be distracted by the state of perpetual domestic chaos that rules my home.