You can't quantify love, and if you try, you can wind up focusing on misleading factors.

Sweetened ice tea is one of the things I love about the South, right up there with homemade biscuits and cheese grits.

Maybe that's what it all comes down to. Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice, again and again, day in and day out, year after year, says more about love than never having a choice to make at all.

I don't really know why I went to law school.

Anxiety was not an emotion I could ever remember feeling when I went out in New York, and I wondered why tonight felt so different. Maybe it was because I no longer had a boyfriend or fiance. I suddenly recognized that there was safety in having someone, as well as a lack of pressure to shine. Ironically, this had cultivated a certain free-spiritedness that had, in turn, allowed me to be the life of the party and hoard the affection of additional men....But that had all changed. I didn't have a boyfriend, a perfect figure, or alcohol-induced outrageousness to fall back on.

A theme in a lot of my books - and in my own life - is making choices that you feel you should make, or what society wants you to make, as opposed to what is truly right for you.

The best reason to pray is that God is really there. In praying our unbelief starts to melt. God moves smack into the middle of even an ordinary day.