Alison McGhee

“Wouldn't want to miss a war, would I?”

“You are most powerful when you are most silent. People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No.”

“Clara Winter," he said. "You are a word person and don't ever forget it."He was right. He knew. He could tell. It's something that can be sensed. There's a difference between word-people and non-word-people.”

“Walk slowly; all you can ever come to is yourself.”

“It's very cool to be short, very cool. When I was in eighth grade, and the height I am now, I would just look at the cute little short girls and think, 'If only, if only.'”

“Your heart literally hurts when it's breaking. You can feel it, every beat another ache, and nothing you can do will stop it, either from beating or breaking.”

“What is the matter with these people, these people who won't stop fighting, won't stop hurting each other long enough to see that a body is a thing of beauty, is a miracle of rivers and oceans and islands and continents contained within itself? That the brain is divided into two hemispheres, each symmetrical, each perfect, each with its own system of waterways. These people of war should be shown an x-ray of an intraparenchymal hemorrhage, of a hemorrhage in an eighteen-year-old girl's brain, a girl named Ivy. Take a look at that, people of war. See, you should not hurt each other, and this is why. Without you ever even trying, this is what can happen to your body, your beautiful body, and your brain, your beautiful symmetrical brain, and your heart, and your soul.”

“I like to write in all different genres. I just like a new challenge.”

“I'm a big State Fair person, and my main goal is to eat as much food as possible, but I tend not to do the foods on a stick. But I like Big Fat Bacon.”

“I suppose, the natural outgrowth about writing about two friends, it becomes about their friendship, and the complexities of it, and the way personality plays off each other, and what they each like to do, separately and together.”