When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that’s always in progress.
I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.
My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.
I was the angriest daughter on earth, and also, one of the most devoted.
Sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.
No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother’s Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture’s bad people and behavior.
Everything takes me forever. It’s all lurch, flail. I hope that is good news to you writers.
Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.
This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of – please forgive me – wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.
You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.
There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.
Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.
My natural tendency is to complicate everything – and then to spray words and ideas onto everything afterwards. I’ve had to develop the habit of keeping things simple.
The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.
We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.
All criticism hurts me. I’m so in the wrong business.
Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.
I do believe that God is with us even when we’re at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects.
The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you’re only as well as you are.
It’s funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it.