I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.

Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, 'We already did. We have made the world new.' The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on.

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

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