People think about history as all grand gestures or significant moments, but the most valuable lesson we can learn is the enduring legacy of the small, meaningful things in life.

As a historian, you can only go as far as the evidence will take you.

Falling in love is really relatively easy compared to staying in love and building a family that lasts.

I never had a plan to be a fiction writer. It's something that happened to me. Sometimes I think maybe it was my spectacular mid-life crisis. Some people buy expensive cars, and I wrote a novel.

I am so thrilled to carve out a few minutes to write that I grab it whenever I can.

Smart is, and has always been, sexy.

I'm entranced by Amanda Lovelace's work. She wrote two wonderful books, 'The Princess Saves Herself in This One' and 'The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One.' You can feel your heart opening because she says things that you thought only you felt.

We live in a world where we think the mysterious is retreating farther and farther from our lives and eventually we will know all there is to know. I love the idea that somehow, there are still things that can be magical.

After 20 years of writing academic prose and lectures, it seems very familiar and straightforward to me. Writing a novel for the first time, I was reminded of just how difficult it is to figure out how to get this stuff done when you don't really know what you're doing.

I love being outdoors and being with animals, and when you're on a horse, you have to leave your anxieties and worries behind in the barn. It's very therapeutic.