When you protect yourself from pain, be sure you do not protect yourself from love.
Perhaps we can come here together someday. By the way, you're a month older than the last time I saw you. Are you still too young to marry.
I had to share a room with my sister, who is five and a half years older than I am. We didn't get along well, and I felt that I had no privacy. So books were my privacy, because no one could join me in a book, no one could comment on the action or make fun of it. I used to spend hours reading in the bathroom -- and we only had one bathroom in our small apartment!
I didn't write professionally at first. It took me nine years to get anything published. At the beginning I mostly wrote picture books, which were rejected by every children's book publisher in America. The first book of mine to be accepted for publication was ELLA ENCHANTED, and not one but two publishers wanted it. That day, April 17, 1996, was one of the happiest in my life.
If beginnings terrify you, or if you just plain don't like writing them, or if they bore you, skip 'em.
Although we didn't invite Lucinda, she arrived anyway-with a gift. "No need," Char and I chimed together. "Remember when you were a squirrel," Mandy said.
Luck was with me. I saw no spiders. Luck was against me. I saw no specters.
If I could, I'd wear my sneakers everywhere, even for dinners or events.
The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.
Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.
I was so devastated by my second divorce that I had a nervous breakdown.