Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.
Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.
The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.
If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.
If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.
Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.
Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.
Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.
Potential has a shelf life.
If your not annoying somebody, you’re not alive.
Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.
And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn’t do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
There’s something final about saying you were married once. It’s like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.
The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.
Sometimes reactions can be quite surprising: readers like things that you, the author, feel you’ve barely gotten away with; or they dislike one of the parts you secretly think is one of your little gems.