Oh, gosh, Olive. I'm so embarrassed." "No need to be," Olive tells her. "We all want to kill someone at some point." (179)

I'm so interested in the fact that we really don't know anybody. We think we know the people close to us, but we don't, we really don't.

Bullies are just frightened people.

It’s just that I’m the kind of person,' Rebecca continued, 'that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn’t be a pin for me.

I have to pay attention to what I have felt and observed, then push these responses to an extreme while keeping the story within the realm of being psychologically and emotionally true.

The fact of the matter is I always have a really high sense of responsibility to the reader, whether it's a few readers that I get or a lot of readers, which I was lucky enough to get with 'Olive.' I feel responsible to them, to deliver something as truthful and straight as I can.

I would hope that my readers feel a sense of awe at the quality of human endurance, at the endurance of love in the face of a variety of difficulties; that the quotidian life is not always easy, and is something worthy of respect.