Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.
I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world-present and in awe.
I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.
Hope begins in the dark.
The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?
You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t.
Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.
I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon – because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.
If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.
It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you’re burping up apple fritters and Cheetos.
Getting into a new relationship is like pouring Miracle-Gro on your character defects.
Left to my own devices, my first inclination is to mess in other people’s lives. I secretly believe my whole family, and really the whole world, is my responsibility.
Expectations are resentments under construction.
Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck.
There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure.
We are not here to see through one another, but to see one another through.
The reason ‘help’ is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you’re in despair, you’re teachable.
He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.