You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.

...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.

What we need to wake people up to now is the crisis in imagination and concern for the greater good. We have no idea what the next ten years, much less the next fifty years, will demand of the coming generation. What we do know is that unless we have a people prepared and eager to meet those crises creatively and compassionately, there is not much hope for this poor old planet of ours.

I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.