In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.
The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.
Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.
This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver’s seat and keeping quiet.
A finished person is a boring person.
Now, a lot of people are challenged by the fact that a record number of people in their sixties have living parents, and a record number of people in their sixties have kids who may still depend upon them.
If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.
The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.
So you’re getting squeezed at both sides. You’re taking care of your mom and dad and you’re still doing caregiving with your kids, which is not easy. But I think overall, there’s a level of satisfaction that might be unparalleled.
A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree – or even, occasionally, the careless – may turn out to be half a life.
A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.
After all those years as a woman hearing ‘not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,’ almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I’m enough.’
I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn’t ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.
Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.
I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that this is not a dress rehersal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don’t discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it’s stupid. Banning books shows you don’t trust your kids to think and you don’t trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.
The purse is the mirror of the soul.