I don't know why this is, but I really believe that things don't happen when we're trying to will them into being. They don't happen when we're waiting for the phone to ring, or the email to pop up in our in box. They don't happen when we're gripping too tightly. They happen - if they happen at all - when we've fully let go of the results. And, perhaps, when we're ready.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

I'll have my students try to follow their minds during the course of a day, just to see the way their minds work, the way our minds hop from thing to thing to thing. The Internet mirrors that to such a degree you can actually see it. Show me your search history and I'll show you who you are.

I used to act in television commercials when I was a kid and a young adult.

Recognize the possibility of the divine in any given moment.

In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein, startles easily. I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn't known was there. ... Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me: fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible, terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone. I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students. In the quiet, in the extra hours, I was forced to ask the question, and to listen carefully to the answer: I was lonely for myself. [p. 123]

After my family leaves in the morning, I'll make my first coffee of the day and then I head upstairs to go to work. At least, that's my plan. I'm not going to check email. I'm not going on Facebook, or sneaking a glimpse at my Instagram feed. No. I'm not going to down that road. But with multiple devices, by the time I get upstairs [to my study] I may well have heard my iPhone ding and - it's Pavlovian.