What I have since realized is that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones.

Read a lot, live your life, and listen and watch, so that your mind fills up with millions of images.

Don't judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.

My granny Torrelli says when you are angry with someone, so angry you are thinking hateful things, so angry maybe you want to punch them, then you should think of the good things about them, and the nice things they've said, and why you liked them in the first place.

I am drawn to the ways in which we are shaped by people and by place.

In many of my books, I explore the ways in which grandparents or other older persons are shaped by the young, and the young are shaped by the old, in an evolving dance.

So much depends upon a blue car splattered with mud speeding down the road.