Navigating Relationships Quotes

Live long enough and you'll disappoint everyone. People think you're able to help them and usually you can't. And so it becomes a process of choosing the one or two people you try hardest not to disappoint. The person in my life I am determined not to disappoint is you.

No compass has ever been invented for the high seas of matrimony.

I don't know a single person in life that doesn't have conflict. I don't really enjoy acting enough to not want to experience something that feels like it really affects things. It's like, if you were a surfer, would you want to surf where there was like two-foot waves, or would you want to surf on like ten-foot waves. To me, the more kind of dramatic stories are more exciting for me, to play with.

I always felt like I was stuck in between my parents, relaying information back and forth and walking on egg shells, not knowing what was going to trigger something to make them mad and not knowing what to say in front of them.

Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land.

I come from a strong matriarchal line. I was raised by Gypsy, her sister, Mary, and my maternal grandmother. The result of not having my father live with us meant that, when it came to understanding the opposite sex, it was like working without a map.

I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring.

Relationships are possible, but are definitely not a road paved with roses.

My freshman year of high school was just awkwardness all around.

I think anytime you're writing to the middle grades, you're writing to young readers who are trapped in a number of ways between two worlds: between childhood and adulthood, between their friends and their parents.