Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house.

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

...The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox. p. 361

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.

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.

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.

She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.