“Life doesn’t make sense. It’s against the law for somebody to steal your bike but apparently it doesn’t matter if somebody tries to steal your best friend. Well you can always get a new bike. But how do you replace a best friend”

“Child, the more you want to hurry life up, the slower it gets.”

“I like writing teen characters because they’re vulnerable to the newness of things; and vulnerability makes emotional responses raw, vital and unguarded. Lacking a context of consequences, choices are riskier and stakes higher. Life is lived without a safety net. As an author and reader, I find that a mighty charge to drama.”

“Save your anger to fight injustice. Forgive the rest.”

“Where there is love there is life; where there is life there is hope.”

“No matter how much you skake and dance, you always get some on your pants.”

“There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.”