Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally Id see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I WOULD be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.

The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.

If there's one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it's that you can't fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It's a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.

But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?

He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.

Looking back at my younger self, that I'm not so different than I am now. I was always a seeker. I wanted very ambitiously to be a writer and what happened between now and then is that I continually threw myself in the way of those things that would help me become that, of doing and finding and learning from things that altered me along the way.