Don't ever admit you know a thing about cooking or it'll be used against you.

Friends are supposed to act like harbor boats-let you know if you're off course. But it ain't always possible.

Flowers heal me. Tulips make me happy. I keep myself surrounded by them as soon as they start coming to the island from Canada, and after that when they come from the fields in La Connor, not far from where I live.

I believe that we are given strength and help from a power much larger than ourselves. I believe if I humble myself that this power will come through me, and help me create work that is bigger than I would have ever been able to have done alone.

Maybe people are more like the earth than we know. Maybe they have fault lines that sooner or later are going to split open under pressure.

we have to suffer mosquitoes the size of blackbirds.

I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

Forget love. Try good manners.

I think of myself as Rebecca Wells from Lodi Plantation, in Central Louisiana, a girl who was lucky enough to be born into a family that encouraged creativity and didn't call me lazy or nuts when I dressed up in my mother's peignoirs and played the piano, having painted a small sign decorated in glitter that read 'The Piano Fairy Girl.

You know how some people, when they're together, they somehow make you feel more hopeful? Make you feel like the world is not the insane place it really is?

Can you reclaim that free-girl smile, or is it like virginity- once you loose it, that's it?

Sadness can find you anywhere, anytime, so you better have fun when you can.

At the beauty of what she had stumbled onto, at the fear that something terrible would happen because she was not vigilant enough. She cried at the fear of something so good that she would not be brave enough to bear it.

Good enough is good enough. Perfect will make you a big fat mess every time.

the process of a book's coming to life is not fully complete until your imagination meets mine on the page. The words evoke pictures and something altogether new is created, something different from the limits of my own skills and imagination. Something that is a marriage between your heart, mind, and body - and mine.