Throughout our lives friends enclose us like pairs of parentheses. They shift our boundaries; crater our terrain. They fume through the cracks of our tentative houses and parts of them always remain. Friendship asks the truth and wants the truth, hollows and fills, ages with us, and we through it. It cradles us like family. It is ecology and mystery and language - all three. Our grown-up friendships - especially the really meaningful ones- model for our children what we want them to have throughout their lives.

Nature is not the number-one mystery, I’ve learned. It’s the heart that takes top honors.

In high school, my desire for friendship far outweighed my talent for it.

Words are the weights which hold our history in place.

Nothing erodes [a mother's love]. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things-hard as the rock of this earth.

Forgiveness, which is the place that every story turns, the chance we give each other.

Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.