I think only once in your life do you find someone that you say, "Hey, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my time on this earth with." An….

My favorite reader is one that revisits books and gets something new out of them each time..

Maybe this was our last summer as best friends. I feel like something's going to change now and I'm not going to be able to change it back. —Margaret.

Mama says it's okay to be on the quiet side—if quiet means you're listening, watching, taking it all in..

I think I'd rather have my heart broke than do the breaking. —Lena.

I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence ….

I pay a lot of attention to whitespace. I pay a lot of attention to the rhythm of words together..

There's me in every character I put on the pages..

I love slow readers. And readers who think about what I've written, think about how it's written - and copy me!.

You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back..

I couldnt be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because Im pretty optimistic..

I've learned about marrying poetry and prose and making both accessible..

Don't trust women, my mother said to me. Even the ugly ones will take what you thought was yours..

Even with all of its changing, Brooklyn's architecture still feels like home, the language feels like home. It's changing so quickly that it's surpri….

I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot o….

The empty swing set reminds us of this-- that bad won't be bad forever, and what is good can sometimes last a long, long time..

I think I had gotten messages really young that poetry wasn't for me, that it was for, basically, some dead white men. My experience and my intellect….

I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories..

I don't know how women stop being friends with other women..

We live inside our parents' backstory..

When I'm writing flawed characters, I just think about my own flaws..