When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town.

You've got to learn to let go and let your children fall, and fail. If you try to protect them from hurt, and always rush to their side with Band-Aids, they won't learn about life, and what is true, what works, what helps, and what are real consequences of certain kinds of behavior. When they do get hurt, which they will, they won't know how to take care of their grown selves. They won't even know where the aspirin is kept.

by then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.

Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware.

Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.

I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.

If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.