I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.

All freedom comes from discipline.

Charles had once remarked that holding onto a resentment was like eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.

Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.

Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.

A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide. It stands out, like a baby's fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.