“When confronted by a ‘believer’ it is easy for me to contrast the views of the skeptic with those of the rationalist. I simply reach into my pocket and pull out my change.Holding a quarter aloft, I say, ‘This is a most remarkable coin, for it is heavier than all the sins of humanity committed since the beginning of the human race.’I then hold up a nickel and say, ‘This coin is even more amazing, as it is brighter and shinier than the flames that proceeded from the Burning Bush discovered on Mt. Sinai by Moses.’Then I raise a penny and state, ‘This portrait of President Lincoln is more realistic and true-to-life than any portrait of Satan ever painted.’And finally, I hold out a bright, shiny dime and say, ‘And this dime is the most amazing of all because it is heavier and contains more precious metals than all the gold bricks in the streets of Heaven.’I end with ‘Give to Caesar what is his, and hold the rest of it dear—for it is all you see and touch—and the Christian god can take care of all his things, for they amount to less than this 41 cents I hold here in my hand.”

“My life is a tree and I can stay in one place and spread out in all directions, and I can do more learning shading this brood of mine than if I was all alone. I declare, it is like some other part of me made up some rules about happiness and I just went along with them without thinking. My heart is lightened so much that I am amazed at how sad I felt for so long.”

“If I were asked to give what I consider the single most useful bit of advice for all humanity, it would be this: Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life, and when it comes, hold your head high. Look it squarely in the eye, and say, 'I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.”

“By now, you know everything about Jackson Clarke, probably way more than anyone on earth wants to hear. This is all I have to add: I still think about him every day. When I see him, my heart jumps up in my chest. I long for him to talk to me, and whenever he even says hello, I feel a thousand times worse than I did before. I wish he was dead. I wish he still liked me.”

“Writing is difficult. You do it all alone without encouragement and without any certainty that you'll ever be published or paid or even that you'll be able to finish the particular work you've begun. It isn't easy to persist amid all that. [...] Sometimes when I'm interviewed, the interviewer either compliments me on my 'talent', my 'gift' or asks me how I discovered it. [...] I used to struggle to answer this politely, to explain that I didn't believe much in writing talent. People who want to write either do it or they don't. At last I began to say that my most important talent - or habit - was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.”

“Jenna reached over and held one of my hands, Kara held the other, and I felt like the universe was holding us all.For that night, maybe just for that magic moment, it all seemed to make so much sense, like the thousand puzzle pieces of my life were all in place and I knew the How and Why of all things. It was one of those moments that I was sure would stay impressed on me forever because it was real and true. It was as tangible as the blanket beneath me. I felt lik I had touched something, something as big as the universe, and it had touched me back. I didn't know that even a big moment like that could be snuffed out in a matter of days by packing to go home, by the wrong teacher on the wrong school schedule, or by my uncle getting his brains blown out at a traffic stop.But all that just made Kara and Jenna brighter stars in my sky. I had no way of knowing that, in a matter of weeks, even those stars would be snuffed out.”

“In all my work what I try to say is that as human beings we are more alike than we are unalike.”