As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift-or curse, perhaps-of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.

We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, drastic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. To know God, you only need to renounce one thing - your sense of division from God

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

I spent a week living as a man. Which was actually, I'm sorry to say, embarrassingly easy for me to do.

I don't think you can say that feminism has made women critical of marriage because women have been critical of marriage for centuries.

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-book shop)