Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

American companies spend more than $200 billion each year hacking women's bodies into bits and pieces, urging comparisons between self and other, linking value to air-brushed ideals, and as the girls in my seventh-grade class graduated to high school and beyond, the imagery around us would only grow more specific, more pummeling, more insidious.

Mastery over the body - its impulses, its needs, its size - is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirability, and to risk desirability is to risk entitlement to sexuality and love and self-esteem.

For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times.

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.