My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.

So what are we supposed to do again, when we hate everything? You stop pretending life is such fun or makes sense. It's often messy and cruel and dull, and we do the best we can. It's unfair, and jerks seem to win. But you fall in love with a few people. Like I love you, Elizabeth. You're the angel God sent me.

Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere... You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.

What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world’s poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?

Life is really pretty tricky, and there's a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn't live without.

[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.

But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?