Ann Hood quotes:

Since my brother died in 1982, my parents and I had formed a shaky tripod of a family; now that I'd lost my father too, it was too easy for me to glimpse a future point where I alone was the keeper of not just my own childhood memories, but of my family lore.

In my adult life, I had spent a lot of time angry at God, mostly over the sudden deaths in my family - my brother at 30, my daughter at 5.

I was a daughterless mother. I had nowhere to put the things a mother places on her daughter. The nail polish I used to paint our toenails hardened. Our favorite videos gathered dust. Her small apron was in a box in the attic. Her shoes - the sparkly ones, the leopard rain boots, the ballet slippers - stood in a corner.

When I was seven years old, I fell in love with a series published by Bobbs-Merrill called 'The Childhood of Famous Americans.' In it, historical figures like Clara Barton, Nancy Hanks, Elias Howe, Patrick Henry, and dozens more came to life for me as children.

This was 1978, when flying was still an occasion, a special grand event that took planning and care. I worked as a TWA flight attendant then. I stood in my Ralph Lauren uniform at the boarding door and smiled at the passengers through lips coated with lipstick that perfectly matched the stripe on my jacket. Mostly, the passengers smiled back.

When I did get married and then had children, it was Beatles' songs I sang to them at night. As one of the youngest of 24 cousins, I had never held an infant or baby-sat. I didn't know any lullabies, so I sang Sam and Grace to sleep with 'I Will' and 'P.S. I Love You.'

Through the eight books in 'The Treasure Chest' series, readers will meet twins Maisie and Felix and learn the secrets and rules of time travel, where they will encounter some of these famous and forgotten people. In Book 1, Clara Barton, then Alexander Hamilton, Pearl Buck, Harry Houdini, and on and on.

Back when I was 8 or 9 and wanted to be a nun, I would often stop at church on my way home from school.

I often feel that I have a split personality. I love more than anything to be in my study writing, but when it's time to do a book tour, I love that extroverted part, too - talking to people, reading, traveling, going out into the world.

I am a step mother, so how children deal with divorce is something I've witnessed first hand and thought about a lot.

Grief doesn't have a plot. It isn't smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end.

We were a family that made our Halloween costumes. Or, more accurately, my mother made them. She took no suggestions or advice. Halloween costumes were her territory. She was the brain behind my brothers winning girl costume, stuffing her own bra with newspapers for him to wear under a cashmere sweater and smearing red lipstick on his lips.

I am thrilled to write 'The Treasure Chest,' and to bring to life not only the childhoods of famous people from history, but also the characters of Maisie and Felix, who I hope you will fall in love with just as I have!

If watching your child die is a parent's worst nightmare, imagine having to tell your other child that his sister is dead... Although I am certain that he cried, that we all cried, what I remember more is how we collapsed into each other, as if the weight of our loss literally crushed us.

When we deal with death, the pupils will always be fixed and dilated, which indicates that there is no longer brain activity or response.

I am the woman with the cool vintage glasses... I am the proud wife beside her husband... I am the writer who has written a new novel.

I have a fondness for writing about precocious, troubled teenagers, who are alienating, but kind of endearing. It's from remembering so clearly that time in my own life. I experienced myself as more dramatically troubled than I was, but I just remember how it felt.

For reasons I can't remember, my family eventually stopped attending church, and I started questioning the Catholic Church's beliefs. I dabbled a little, but nothing stuck.

My daughter, Grace, was not killed by a gun. She died suddenly at age 5 from a virulent form of strep. As I stood stunned in a church at her memorial, one of the hardest things I heard someone say was, 'I'm going to go home and hug my child a little tighter.' 'Well, good for you,' I thought. 'I'm going to go home and scream.'

I was kind of an outsider growing up, and I preferred reading to being with other kids. When I was about seven, I started to write my own books. I never thought of myself as wanting to be a writer - I just was one.

I learned to knit in 2002, six months after my 5-year-old daughter, Grace, died suddenly from a virulent form of strep. I was unable to read or write, and friends suggested I take up knitting; almost immediately I fell under its spell.

There are so many cruel decisions parents have to make when their child dies. The funeral director requested a sheet for the coffin, and I sent the cozy flannel one, pale blue with happy snowmen, that had just been put away with the winter linens.

Everyone has read about or knows someone who has gone through fertility treatments. It is an emotional nightmare, fueled by false hope and the promise of a treatment that will work.

After 9/11, new security measures not only added longer lines and earlier check-ins, but took away our privilege of carrying knitting needles or our favorite moisturizer on board with us. Although we want to be safe when we fly, in some ways it all just adds to the misery of our experience.

Dead bodies do get a grayish blue/purple hue because blood pools in the capillaries and the body starts to decompose. It's not smurf blue, but it's not a pleasant shade.

When I began my career as a flight attendant, I was a 21-year-old with a B.A. in English and stars in her eyes. I wanted to see every city in the world. I wanted to have adventures that, I hoped, would fuel a writing career some day.

God does give us more than we can bear sometimes.

Grief made people guilty. Guilty for being five minutes late, for taking the wrong streetcar, for ignoring a couph or sleeping too soundly. Guilt and grief went hand in hand.

As an adult, I took ballet classes three times a week, and I believed it gave me better posture, a stronger body, and made me more graceful.

Time doesn't heal, I had learned, it just keeps moving. And it takes us with it.

My cousins and I used to play Beatle wives. We all wanted to be married to Paul, but John was O.K. too. None of us wanted Ringo. Or even worse, George.

Even now, there are still days so beautiful, I almost believe in God.

We were a family that made our Halloween costumes. Or, more accurately, my mother made them. She took no suggestions or advice. Halloween costumes were her territory. She was the brain behind my brother's winning girl costume, stuffing her own bra with newspapers for him to wear under a cashmere sweater and smearing red lipstick on his lips.

I was a mother who worked ridiculously hard to keep catastrophe at bay. I didn't allow my kids to eat hamburgers for fear of E. coli. I didn't allow them to play with rope, string, balloons - anything that might strangle them. They had to bite grapes in half, avoid lollipops, eat only when I could watch them.

I have learned that there is more power in a good strong hug than in a thousand meaningful words.

I write so that people will read what I write. I don't want to write a book that a thousand people read, or just privileged people read. I want to write a book whose emotional truth people can understand. For me, that's what it's about.

As someone who has lived the nightmare of losing a child, I know that the enormous hole left behind remains forever.

Time passes and I am still not through it. Grief isn't something you get over. You live with it. You go on on with it lodged in you. Sometimes I feel like I have swallowed a pile of stones. Grief makes me heavy. It makes me slow. Even on days when I laugh a lot, or dance, or finish a project, or meet a deadline, or celebrate, or make love, it is there. Lodged deep inside of me.

No one can write like Cheryl Strayed.

A sibling is the lens through which you see your childhood.

In Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline seamlessly knits together the past and present of two women, one young and one old. Kline reminds us that we never really lose anyone or anything or â?? perhaps most importantly â?? ourselves.

Don't waste your one beautiful life.

No mother should lose her child.

love is reliable. infatuation is temporary.

The only language she could speak was grief. How could he not know that? Instead, she said, "I love you." She did. She loved him. But even that didn't feel like anything anymore.