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

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

Every time I see the bumper sticker that says “We think we’re humans having spiritual experiences, but we’re really spirits having human experiences,” I (a) think it’s true and (b) want to ram the car.

Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we're invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.

It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.

No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I feel like you pay all day for that hour. That's what books mean to me. I can open this two-dimensional , flat white page with squiggly little black marks on them, and someone has created this world that you're going to enter into.

For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.