As someone who has lived the nightmare of losing a child, I know that the enormous hole left behind remains forever.

- Ann Hood

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

- Ann Hood

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.

- Ann Hood

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.

- Ann Hood

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

- 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.

- Ann Hood

There are so many cruel decisions parents have to make when their child dies. The funeral director requested a sheet for the coffin, and I sent the cozy flannel one, pale blue with happy snowmen, that had just been put away with the winter linens.

- Ann Hood

When I was seven years old, I fell in love with a series published by Bobbs-Merrill called 'The Childhood of Famous Americans.' In it, historical figures like Clara Barton, Nancy Hanks, Elias Howe, Patrick Henry, and dozens more came to life for me as children.

- Ann Hood

If watching your child die is a parent's worst nightmare, imagine having to tell your other child that his sister is dead... Although I am certain that he cried, that we all cried, what I remember more is how we collapsed into each other, as if the weight of our loss literally crushed us.

- Ann Hood

My cousins and I used to play Beatle wives. We all wanted to be married to Paul, but John was O.K. too. None of us wanted Ringo. Or even worse, George.

- Ann Hood

Babies make you do things for them. They get you up and they get you moving.

- Ann Hood

God does give us more than we can bear sometimes.

- Ann Hood

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.

- Ann Hood

After 9/11, new security measures not only added longer lines and earlier check-ins, but took away our privilege of carrying knitting needles or our favorite moisturizer on board with us. Although we want to be safe when we fly, in some ways it all just adds to the misery of our experience.

- Ann Hood

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!

- Ann Hood

I write so that people will read what I write. I don't want to write a book that a thousand people read, or just privileged people read. I want to write a book whose emotional truth people can understand. For me, that's what it's about.

- Ann Hood

When I began my career as a flight attendant, I was a 21-year-old with a B.A. in English and stars in her eyes. I wanted to see every city in the world. I wanted to have adventures that, I hoped, would fuel a writing career some day.

- Ann Hood

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.

- Ann Hood

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

- Ann Hood

I was a mother who worked ridiculously hard to keep catastrophe at bay. I didn't allow my kids to eat hamburgers for fear of E. coli. I didn't allow them to play with rope, string, balloons - anything that might strangle them. They had to bite grapes in half, avoid lollipops, eat only when I could watch them.

- Ann Hood