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. . .There are certain people who come into your life, and leave a mark. . . Their place in your heart is tender; a bruise of longing, a pulse of unfinished business. Just hearing their names pushes and pulls at you in a hundred ways, and when you try to define those hundred ways, describe them even to yourself, words are useless.
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My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.
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I didn't 'decide' to write YA, per se. But every time I thought of a story, it featured characters 15, 16, 17.
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It's as if once you hit high school, you're programmed, like a robot, to be an asshole to your parents.
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It's not words, so much, just my mind going blank and thoughts reaching up up up, me wishing I could climb through the ceiling and over the stars until I can find God, really see God, and know once and for all that everything I've believed my whole life is true, and real. Or, not even everything. Not even half. Just the part about someone or something bigger than us who doesn't lose track. I want to believe the stories, that there really is someone who would search the whole mountainside just to find that one lost thing that he loves, and bring it home.
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A know a place called New Beginnings, but I don't think it works quite like that. You can't just erase everything that came before.
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The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.
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I don't like to do too much psychological research because it might turn a character into a patchwork.
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He felt it too, the air between us, the invisible lines that something or someone had drawn to connect us. That's the way I remember it.
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I wouldn't say I'm stuck in my adolescence, but I think, like a lot of people, I carry my teen years with me. I feel really in touch with those feelings, and how intense and complicated life seems in those years.
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Everyone has an identity crisis when they are 16 or 17 years old.
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I wonder how you're supposed to know the exact moment when there's no more hope.
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I'm remembering how this works. How life doesn't have to be only anxiety about what's gone wrong or could go worng, and complaints about the world around you. How a person you're excited about can remind you there's stuff going on beyond... routine oil changes and homework. Stuff that matters. Stuff to look forward to.
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It came down to the smallest things, really, that a person could do to say I’m sorry, to say it’s okay, to say I forgive you. The tiniest of declarations that built, one on top of the other, until there was something solid beneath your feet. And then… and then. Who knew?
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Don't ask me how I am,' I blurt. 'Please.' I want to keep feeling good. Just because the lights are on doesn't mean I have to look.
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I looked at my hand resting on the shelf of the prop cabinet, thinking of the scars that were there whether anyone could see them or not.
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Your greatest creation is your creative life. It's all in your hands. Rejection can't take it away; reviews can't take it away. The life you create for yourself as an artist, may be the only thing that's really yours. Create a life you can center yourself in calmly as you wait for your work to grow.
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What brings two people together anyway?
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My whole life has been one big broken promise.
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I remember being in high school and listening to Vivaldi's 'Winter' and being so overwhelmed with emotion.
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He's a story i want to know from page one.
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I know I shouldn't say this—I know it as surely as I know the earth is round and beats are evil—and yet here it comes: “It's not too late to change your mind.
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That's how life feels to me. Everyone is doing it; everyone knows how. To live and be who they are and find a place, find a moment. I'm still waiting.
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There's a lot that is awful. That's the struggle of getting old. To make sure you don't let what's hard...obscure the beauty.