Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides.

I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.

I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.

No" is a complete sentence.

My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.

Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost - his or her wildest, most messed-up children - the way you'd ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.