I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.

The only way I've been able to stay informed without letting fury rule my life is to channel my rage into something that ultimately feels like love to me. The place I do that the best is in my writing. That's where I feel like I can tap into the power of story and maybe bring something good into the world.

Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

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

I'll never know, and neither will you of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.