I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled - all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you - stature, the respect of colleagues, maybe even a kind of low-grade fame.

I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.

When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress.

Getting into a new relationship is like pouring Miracle-Gro on your character defects.

I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.

When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town.

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.