MARY E. PEARSON

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Tell me who I am. (29)

It can take years to mold a dream. It takes only a fraction of a second for it to be shattered.

It's other people who make us wise, and I haven't known nearly enough.

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

What I think is all I have left. My mind is the only thing that makes me different from a fancy toaster. What we think does matter-it's all we truly have.

You've always been two people. The Jenna who wants to please and the Jenna who secretly resents in. They won't break, you know. Your parents never thought you were perfect. You did.

Where we are going, I don't know. It doesn't seem to be the place that is important but the steps in between.

Sometimes there's not a better way. Sometimes there's only the hard way.

There are a lot of memories we imagine. We play them over and over in our minds, trying to orchestrate our movements and words to perfection. Or maybe it's just that I've lived inside of my head more than any other person in the history of the world. Maybe none of us can really predict how we will act at any give moment. Maybe we're all at the mercy of circumstance in spite of our well-laid plans.

On a small planet, where minute follows minute, day follows day, year follows year, where tradition marches on with a deafening, orderly beat -sometimes the order is disturbed by a dreamer, an artist, a scribbler - sometimes the beat is changed one person at a time.

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.

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.

Maybe we all have a dark place inside of us, a place where dark thoughts and darker dreams live, but it doesn't have to become who we are.

When is a cell finally too small to hold our essence?

How can you be sure?" "I'm a doctor, Jenna. And a scientist." "Does that make you an authority on everything? What about a soul, Father? When you were so busy implanting all your neural chips, did you think about that? Did you snip my soul from my old body, too? Where did you put it? Show me! Where? Where in all this groundbreaking technology did you insert my soul?

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