Quotes from Jenna Blum

I was a hostess, a waitress, a cafe manager, and a prep chef. For one job, I had to wear a hat shaped like a head of garlic.

Make a list of activities that keep you tethered to your creative world, and put it where you can see it every day - like, right in the center of your image board.

I have people in my family with bipolar disorder, and for years I've watched them struggle with the disorder's extreme moods and often devastating consequences.

My novella, 'The Lucky One,' is inspired in part by my dad and also by a Holocaust survivor I interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.

When I lived in Minneapolis in my twenties, and my mom lived there, too, I used to take her 'storm chasing' - by which I mean I'd see a pulsing blob of radar on The Weather Channel and make her drive us toward the storm.

I've been fascinated with severe weather since I was four, when I saw a tornado at night in my mom and grandmother's southeast Minnesota hometown while everyone else was asleep - an experience I encoded in 'The Stormchasers.'

I have to read once a day, or I become cranky.

Information trumps fear, right?

It's like being in a sort of club, isn't it? A bereavement club. You don't choose to join it; it's thrust upon you. And the members whose lives have been changed have more knowledge than those who aren't in it, but the price of belonging is so terribly high.

Kinder, Kirche, Küche: children, church, kitchen; this is what all German girls hope for;

So you see, he says softly, we are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?

No," he said, "I have no sensation there." That was true, and it was the blessing of scars: the deeper they were, the more you couldn't feel anything in them at all.

Each person has this choice to make about how to live with the past, this dignity, this inviolable right.

Anna imagines that, were she able to visit the caves in which people first dwelled, she would find scrawled drawings that have been omitted from museums and history books. There would be scenes of ritual aggression and submission, painted in blood, caked with dried seminal fluid. They are the very antithesis of fresh, the rites between men and women; age-old and rotten to the core.

You are such a young and childish country, believing that one can better understand the injuries of the past by wallowing in them and analyzing their causes. You do not know enough to understand that the only way to heal a wound is to leave it alone. To let sleeping dogs lie, as it were, rather than enthusiastically kicking them as

Kinder, Kirche, Küche: children, church, kitchen; this

She can never tell him what she started to say: that we come to love those who save us. For although Anna does this is true, the word that sick in her throat was not save by shame.

world to be safe, pokes its soft head from

People ostensibly turning a blind eye to their neighbors' activities while really harvesting and analyzing every last detail of their lives. The ingredients for their dinners. The color of their underwear, purchased in the local Ben Franklin. Who is sick, who is well, who is adulterous.

Goethe's Oak, which

this book. It takes a village to raise a child, which is precisely what writing a novel is. If I have

Sometimes, it seems, when you let people know what you're going through, help arrives when you're least expecting it, bringing you what you didn't know you needed, in forms above and beyond what you've ever imagined.

The American infantry, it is said, has seized control of cities as close as Eisenach and Ehrfurt, ransacking and burning the houses, raping the women, worse than the Russians.

trudging a determined circuit around Lake Harriet even in the most dismal weather.