Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is American, too-the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness.

That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.

There is no choice more intensely personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.

Until-as often happened during those first months travel, whenever I would feel such happiness-my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper? I replied aloud to him: "First of all," I said, "I'm very sorry, but this isn't your business anymore. And secondly, to answer you question...yes.

There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.

God dwells within you, as you.

At the end of the day I am a writer, and if I don't take care of this, no one else will.