Suzanne LaFleur
I grew up outside Boston in Newton, and later Natick, MA. During the school year I went to Catholic school, did a lot of homework, and read a couple books a week. During the summer I read a couple books a day and spent hours swimming and playing outside at our local pool or beach. I was very much a planner, dreamer, and writer, creating plays and shows for my siblings and the neighborhood kids to be in and filling up entire notebooks with novels. I always read late into the night and slept with a book under my pillow.
I went to college in Lexington, VA at Washington and Lee, where I studied English and European History; I went to grad school in New York City at The New School, where I studied Writing for Children.
Now I divide my time between Natick, MA and New York. Due to my frequent travels, I don't really have a "typical" day, but most days I spend some time writing, reading, exercising (swimming, lifting, or walking), and visiting with friends. I like to warm up for writing by playing computer games. I do my best writing at home in my pajamas, though a lot of days I will venture out to a library to work (in jeans and a sweatshirt, rather than PJ's!). Most days I take a nap, which I tend to do with a book on my chest, whether or not I was actually reading it before I fell asleep. I still read before bed, and, now that I'm older and have a big bed to myself, I slide the book I'm reading under the pillow next to me (rather than the one I'm planning to sleep on!).
“We have plenty of room for people...in our lives, I mean. Especially the ones who make us be the people we want to be.”
“A good friend is one of the hardest things to keep in this life. Don't forget that sometimes you have to work at it.”
“But in life people come and go. We don't always have control over it. But we can control how we respond. We can keep going, keep living the best we can. We can love the people we have instead of shutting them out. We can do our best to get to know them in the time we have.”
“But I remind myself that I know you. I know your heart, and that will always stay the same, so I will always know you...”
“No matter how much we love someone, or think we know them, we can never know what it is like to be inside them.”
“Sometimes I wonder if life is all about one moment. Everything before and everything after is about that one moment, and we are all stuck there.”
“But really, anybody could die any day, whether you were ready or not. It could be your pet fish or your sister or you. Nothing is the same forever. Maybe all the people on Earth are God's little pet fish. God lives such a long time that people's lives probably seem really short to him. He watches them swim for a little while, and then they stop swimming. ”