Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.

If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.

I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.

Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.

...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

[Her] work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things -- a mother, a lover, a listener, a nurturer -- and you could also be critically astute and radical and have a minority opinion that was profoundly moral.

And my fear of failure has been lifelong and deep. If you are what you do- and I think my parents may have accidentally given me this idea- and you do poorly, what then? It’s over; you’re wiped out. All those prophecies you heard in the dark have come true, and people can see the real you, see what a schmendrick you are, what a fraud.