Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop.

Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it's what you believe, and the heck with everybody.

Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.

Writing is a job: you must show up.

Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman's pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.

I was very much a child of the Cold War.