Ann Hood

“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.”

“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.”

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

“When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“No mother should lose her child.”

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

“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.”

“Could a writer understand how her book had saved someone long ago, when the world was a fragile, scary place and the people she loved weren't in it anymore? Could a writer understand that her book had mattered more than anything?”

“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 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!”

“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.”

“On April 18, 1906, when that earthquake hit San Francisco and took David from her, Vivien began to speak the language of grief. She understood that grief is not neat and orderly; it does not follow any rules. Time does not heal it. Rather, time insists on passing, and as it does, grief changes but does not go away. Sometimes she could actually visualize her grief. It was a wave, a tsunami that came unexpectedly and swept her away. She could see it, a wall of pain that had grabbed hold of her and pulled her under. Some days, she could reach the air and breathe in huge comforting gulps. Some days she barely broke the surface, and still, after all this time, some days it consumed her and she wondered if there was any way free of it.”

“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.”

“God does give us more than we can bear sometimes.”

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