Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

We are awash in the revealed world.

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'

[After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

the separation of church and state grew out of a desire, not so much to protect government from religion, but to protect religion from government.

All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.