There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.

The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

I am at the bookstore a lot, but let my friends, the professional Birchbark Books staff, handle the day in and day out.

I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents' house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.

I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.

You never know where you're going to find the same thoughts in another brain, but when it happens you know it right off, just like you were connected by a small electrical wire that suddenly glows red hot and sparks.