My favorite reader is one that revisits books and gets something new out of them each time.

Where I grew up, it was all people who were black and Latino, people who look like me. Now I live in a neighborhood where very, very few people look like me.

Lately, I'd been feeling like I was standing outside watching everything and everybody. Wishing I could take the part of me that was over there and the part of me that was over here and push them together—make myself into one whole person like everybody else.

You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.

Mama says it's okay to be on the quiet side—if quiet means you're listening, watching, taking it all in.

When you think of how a child experiences a series of events, it feels, for so long, like she's looking at everything from behind this glass and it's obscured.

That's what makes best friends. It's not whether or not you live on the same block or go to the same school, but how you feel about each other in your hearts.