I was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will.

If there's anything weirder than an introverted writer going to lots of social functions, it's an introverted writer being converted into an accidental guru.

Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.

I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.

Recognize the possibility of the divine in any given moment.

I remember getting my first cell phone in New York, getting into a taxi and thinking "This is the end of solitude in the back of a taxi." What used to happen in the back of a taxi? You looked out the window. My brain has become less able to spend lengths of time without shifting, and I worry about that.

I needed to slow down and quiet down deeply into a lot of these questions, yet at the same time what I was looking for, and continue to, is a way to have this exist within a regular, normal, modern life.