People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.

I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.

... suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us extraordinary

And while it is true that I got the best woman in the world, I don't think love saves you.

I have a terrible memory.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.