There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it.

The truth is that progress is usually small and sneaky.

It is unearned love--the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

It's intrusive for grandparents to think they're in charge. It's manipulative. Also, it's self-destructive, since if the parents have to resist you, you won't get your mitts on the kid as often.

...one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. ... Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down.