People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I never get over being thankful for that - for the courage of my readers.

The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.

You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.