Deb Caletti
When your arms are out wide, you'll capture love and joy and golden moments but other things, too. Mistrust will sneak in on a wave of that joy, and complications will ride the backs of the golden moments, and there will be both love and the risks of love. That's the way it is. That's the design.Collection: Design
'The Nature of Jade' is about a girl who works with the elephants at the zoo near her home, and who, through her involvement with them, becomes involved with a boy and his baby.
Although I love snow, it messes things up terribly around Seattle, with all of our hills. I worry about my loved ones driving.
I've never met a popcorn ball I didn't like.
Like all kids with divorced parents, I have an abundance of holidays.
I would eat fruitcake if there'd been a nuclear war and I'd run out of canned goods.
You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.
All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.
I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.
All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy.
I think a setting is hugely important. I look at setting as a character with its own look, sound, history, quirks, goofy temperaments and moods.
If you think about becoming a writer, that's just really one of the big dreams I had. It's really important to have those dreams and pursue your passions.
Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the 'Queen of Everything,' I thought it was a book for adults.
One of the most constant and sustaining truths of my life has been this: I love the library.
I understood right from the start that every set of library doors were the sort of magic portals that lead to other lands. My God, right within reach there were dinosaurs and planets and presidents and girl detectives!
My most memorable teacher was Rich Campe, my third-grade teacher at Fairlands Elementary in Pleasanton, California.
I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for.
I long for books; I am utterly greedy about them.
Bliss is the ocean, a towel on the sand, the sun out, the chance to swim in waves or walk dragging a stick behind you, a good book, a cold drink.
I became a writer because I love books, and I believe in their power.
To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.
Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.
When I was a young mother at home with a two year old and a five year old, living on the Eastside in one of those neighborhoods where all the houses look the same, where all the cars look the same and the lawns look the same, I was writing in secret.
My dream was, and always had been, to write a book. To be a writer.
I wrote one book, signed with a good agent, and sat back and waited for the phone to ring. I was sure that the great news would come at any moment. Four books later, I finally got that call.
When you go looking for rescue, you end up trapped in your own weakness.
In a lifetime, the recipe always needs amending - more of this, a little less of that, what to do now that the cake has fallen.
Often, marriage was solitude, with company.
It's human nature to want to help and soothe and save with your love, but it's also arrogant.
Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can't even see straight.
Marriage is like a well-built porch. If one of the two posts leans too much, the porch collapses. So each must be strong enough to stand on its own.Collection: Family
One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to.Collection: Knowing
Love is ease, love is comfort, love is support and respect. Love is not punishing or controlling. Love lets you grow and breathe. Love's passion is only good passion -- swirling-leaves-on-a-fall-day passion, a-sky-full-of-magnificent-stars passion -- not angst and anxiety. Love is not hurt and harm. Love is never unsafe. Love is sleeping like puzzle pieces. It's your own garden you protect; it's a field of wildflowers you move about in both freely and together.Collection: Hurt
Too often in my life, love has been defined as "humiliation with occasional roses".Collection: Love Life
No one is ever quite as strong or as weak as you'd think.Collection: Strong
It's hard to see clearly when your eyes are squinched tight out of fear.Collection: Eye
A person who says "it's your decision" is informing you that your decision sucks.Collection: Decision
You take care of the people you love, but it’s true, too, that you take care of the things you own.Collection: People
A lot of life is just surviving what happens.Collection: Life Is
It’s a simple truth that a secret is something you’re ashamed of.Collection: Simple
You've got to say what you mean and mean what you say...Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through.Collection: Mean
This is what happens when nice people are pushed too far. We give too many chances, and so when we've finally had enough, we are well and truly done. When a nice person shuts a door on you, it's shut for good.Collection: Nice
Love can come when you're already who you are, when you're filled with you. Not when you look to someone else to fill the empty space.Collection: Space
The scariest part of forever is that nothing is.Collection: Forever
They say religion is about love, but you wonder how much of it really is about fear.Collection: Fear
You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.Collection: Past
I shouldn't have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn't be so afraid of losing someone that I'll do anything to make them stay.Collection: Liars
The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.Collection: Lonely
Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same.Collection: Together Again
We can get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions that we miss the simple beauty of the truth.Collection: Simple