Absence makes the heart grow frozen, not fonder.

[On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.

But it's hard to be hip over thirty when everyone else is nineteen, when the last dance we learned was the Lindy, and the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbara Streisand were trying to do something about it.

Sun lighting a child's hair. A friend's embrace. Slow dancing in a safe and quiet place. The pleasures of an ordinary life.

Adolescence involves our nutty-desperate-ecstatic-rash psychological efforts to come to terms with new bodies and outrageous urges.

READ! Books can be as delicious as hot-fudge sundaes, as funny as clowns, as exciting as a baseball game that's tied in the 9th inning, and as beautiful as the best sunset you ever saw.

I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.