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.

You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.

All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth are the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full.

Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.

I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.

I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.

Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.