Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.

But that Franklin trip changed me profoundly. As I believe wilderness experience changes everyone. Because it puts us in our place. The human place, which our species inhabited for most of its evolutionary life. That place that shaped our psyches and made us who we are. The place where nature is big and we are small.

September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.