I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.

It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.

There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.

it's the thing you fear most that walks beside you all the time.

Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!