You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born.

Grace means you're in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.

Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.

We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature.