People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved.

Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one.

You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way.

Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.

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

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.

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.