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Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other
but in looking outward in the same direction. --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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From an interview with Kelly...

Q: What writers do you admire?

A: That's a tougher question than it appears. Typically, I like whomever I'm
reading or whomever I've just read. I recently finished Cormac McCarthy's The
Road. I'm still moved and haunted by that. But if we're talking classics, I have
to start with Hemingway. He once said something to the effect that we need to
"make and not show", meaning, I think, the writing should have people saying and
doing. It's movement and not explication. If you look at his short stories, you
see such a brilliant economy of prose. I just finished [Margaret] Atwood's Oryx
and Crake. I'm a little behind in somethings. The novel was a bit of a letdown
for me. I love much of what she's written, but I can't help feeling the ending
just wasn't right with this one. I'm also reading Richard Bach's One, which I'm
considering for a class I'm teaching to college freshmen.

Q: Well, that answers my other question about what you're reading now. What
influenced you when you were young?

A: Is that a comment on my age? [laughs] I know, you meant my childhood. I loved
things like the Encylopedia Brown books and the first one that really grabbed me
as a girl was Harriet The Spy. I'll tell you a story. When I was in
Kindergarten, I was reading Dick and Jane. See, there's confirmation of age! My
teacher was talking with a parent and I was standing there reading this little
book. My teacher asked what I was doing. Reading, I said. "Oh how cute. She
thinks she's reading," she said to the parent. I was really reading. She pointed
to some of the words, and I said them, and then she says to me, "Well, you're
not supposed to be reading in Kindergarten" and then she did something with the
parent. I remember being crushed, thinking I had somehow done something wrong.
Next thing I know, I have to go into a small room with a different adult to be
"tested". I was horrified. Then in fifth grade, I was reading Madeline L'Engle's
Wrinkle in Time series. I forget which book it was, but I didn't know what
mitochondia were, so I asked my teacher what that word was. She said, "look it
up." I said I tried but that word wasn't in the dictionary. She looked in her
teacher's version, didn't see it, and then said something to the effect that I
shouldn't be reading books with big words in them. But that didn't stop me. A
year or two later I was thumbing through the index of a book my dad bought from
some Time-Life series. There it was: mitochonria! I was amazed. I finally had an
answer. I learned very quickly that adults don't have all the answers and adults
aren't always right. I try to teach that in all of my classes.