No' is golden. 'No' is the kind of power the good witch wields. It's the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives.

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

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.

He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.

Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.

That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.

My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home.