"I can't remember a time when my mom didn't work. She has forever been on the move: a go-getter. When my brother Adel and I had a paper route as kids, my mom would get up before us at the crack of dawn to drop off the Washington Post at different corners."

"I've had weight issues all my life. I've been on all the diets: Atkins, liquid protein, Scarsdale diet. Now I go to the gym often. I'm always on the StairMaster, and I do weights."

"To this day, my mom's unsinkable spirit is an inspiration to me. For nearly thirty years, she's worked at the Library of Congress. Everyone knows Sameha simply as 'Sami.' Along with 500 miles of shelved books, her closest friendships are cataloged in that library. They are as much the value of work to my mom as is the work itself."

"Sometimes you have to take the focus off of you and put it on someone else and it's funny what you can accomplish and how much strength you really have."

"The word that almost makes me throw up is satin; damask makes me throw up."

"While 'Visitation Street' has the markings of a traditional whodunnit mystery - starting with a missing girl, intrigue and many suspicious characters - Pochoda shows her hand early on by fingering a culprit. The book turns, then, into a 'whydunnit.'"

"The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way."

"All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need."