Safety is relative. You can be so close to shore that you can practically feel it under your feet, when you suddenly find yourself breaking apart on the rocks.

Hopefully, more and more people will come to understand that a child who's "different from" is not one who is "lesser than."

What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.

It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.

I could not remember my first kiss, but I could have told you Charlotte would be my last.

It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.