“Emotion~Writing a scene that you have to walk away from because you can't see the words through your own tears.~M. L. Stephens”

“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”

“It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.”

“If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.”

“You need to walk away, Pidge. God knows I can't walk away from you.”

“If I need something you can't give, I need to walk away, because sooner or later, all I'll see is what you can't give. I won't be able to see what you can.”