Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.

I was the angriest daughter on earth, and also, one of the most devoted.

This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.

And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.

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.