This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.
I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much.
Your inside person doesn’t age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you’ve ever been.
So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you.
It’s so great to be able to make people laugh, because this is so often how we get our selves back.
There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are.
Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe.
What an incredible drug fear is.
Life is really pretty tricky, and there’s a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn’t live without.
I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don’t have a clue how hard it is going to be.
If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.
You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you’re dirty and rattled.
The truth of my experience is that we are all a lot more alike than we are different.
Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.
Writing is how I communicate my deepest beliefs, and what I hope are helpful observations about our dual citizenship, as children of God, as regular old mixed-up, worried, flawed, precious human beings.
I’m one of those religious people who are afraid of everything. I’m instantly worried about everything that could go wrong.
There are these people who keep taking you in and feeding you and loving you and making the world a tiny bit safer than it feels. People have community and family, but existentially we are deeply isolated.
Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.
I don’t have any romantic views of parenting. Every step of the way it’s really hard. It’s a dangerous world, physically and psychologically.
No matter what circumstances, it’s hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world.