Quotes from Mary E. Pearson

Teens affect history. They affect lives; they affect our cultural growth and change, and yet, and at the same time, they are often the most vulnerable among us.

I have a manuscript that I'm almost done with, but I've been saying that forever. I'm on what I think will be the second-to-last chapter. It's a story about chance and coincidence.

Teens are passionate, questioning, curious, have a bit of the idealism I still cling to, and they're making decisions for the first time that can alter the course of their lives - and sometimes, the course of the world.

Pieces. Isn't that what all of life is anyway? Shards. Bits. Moments. Am I less because I have fewer, or do the few I have mean more?

Fifty years in the future, I should hope we'll be on our second woman president, at least.

... Change doesn't happen overnight-it's molded by people who don't give up

Maybe staying on the surface keeps her from returning to a place where she can't breathe.

Escape is not about moving from one place to another. It's about becoming more.

When your life has had few events to occupy it, it's amazing how a simple encounter can seem like an entire three-act play.

We all have a dark place in us. It's what we do with it and the choice we make.

Maybe the impossible is possible when you take everything else away.

There are all kinds of friends you make in life... But there's something different about someone who spreads their wings with you.

I am undependable. You might get gritty contemporary with one book, science fiction, magical realism, or high fantasy with another.

Father says it will come in time. "Time heals," he says. I don't tell him that I don't know what time is.

Do certain events in our lives leave a permanent mark, freezing a piece of us in time, and that becomes a touchstone that we measure the rest of our lives against?

...and time becomes a forgotten detail.

Airports and 'leg room' on planes are a form of medieval torture.

What we think is ethical today, we may not have thought ethical five or 10 years ago. Cloning, stem cell research? However we feel about those things today, we may feel differently 10 years from now.

Maybe there was no one way to define it. Maybe there were as many shades of love as the blues of the sky.

When I first began writing, and I told people what I wrote, I'd get a blank stare and sometimes a 'Huh?' They weren't sure what young adult literature was. Now everyone knows.

Picture yourself five years from now. Where do you want to be? Remember that. Every day. That's how you'll get there.

I've discovered I love the vast landscape a series offers. I tend to write long anyway, so, it turns out, series gives me the perfect vehicle for writing 'large' stories.

I think that maybe forgiveness is like change - it comes in small steps. (256)

Which weakness shall I tell her? "I walk funny," I say, and she's satisfied with that. (inside joke)