I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.
You’re not a wave, you’re a part of the ocean.
Scenery without solace is meaningless.
I don’t know about Heaven or Hell, but I do know that we are visited all the time by the spirits of those who affected us in life.
I don’t know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it’s something that anyone can make – pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad – but it carries a certain taste of memory.
Sometimes, kids want you to hurt the way they hurt.
I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day.
I believe that you live on inside the hearts and minds of everyone you’ve touched while you were here on earth.
Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We’re teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own. Most people can’t do it.
Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.
Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.
I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you’ll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.
We all lose somebody we care about and want to find some comforting way of dealing with it, something that will give us a little closure, a little peace.
Love wins, love always wins.
Going back to something is harder than you think.
You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.
It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.
We need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done. You can’t get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened.
Don’t let our outside labels or how fervent we look or zealous we are or how righteous we seem; that’s not how you measure yourself against other people. Everyone is a child of God; if we really believed that, we’d treat each other better.
Miracles happen quietly every day – in an operating room, on a stormy sea, in the sudden appearance of a road side stranger. They are rarely tallied. No one keeps score.