“Nothing in the world is like this-a bright white page withpale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencilthe soft hush of itmoving finallyone dayinto letters.”

“You're writing, you're coasting, and you're thinking, 'This is the best thing I've ever written, and it's coming so easily, and these characters are so great.' You put it aside for whatever reason, and you open it up a week later and the characters have turned to cardboard and the book has completely fallen apart," she says. "That's the moment of truth for every writer: Can I go on from here and make this book into something? I think it separates the writers from the nonwriters. And I think it's the reason a lot of people have that unfinished manuscript around the house, that albatross.”

“This is what kindness does, Ms.Albert said. Each little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world.”

“At the day's end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and the way light filters into and out of a scene. The deeper messages often escape her.Sometimes I take for granted the journey through the telling. At other times I curse the muse's power. But through it all, I live each day in deep gratitude.”

“I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame—of everything.”

“Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes.”

“I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone?”

“I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.”

“Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies?”

“Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies? 'Sister Sonja often asked me, as though to understand the depth and breadth of human suffering would be enough to pull me outside of my own.”

“Nothing in the world is like this-a bright white page withpale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencilthe soft hush of itmoving finallyone dayinto letters.”