Mid-grade readers don't have short attention spans, they just have low boredom tolerance.

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

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

Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced.

We cannot love others as others unless we possess suficient self-love, a love we learn from being loved in infancy.

We will have to give up the hope that, if we try hard, we somehow will always do right by our children. The connection is imperfect. We will sometimes do wrong.

Being in love is better than being in jail, a dentist's chair, or a holding pattern over Philadelphia, but not if he doesn't love you back.