Although fear in the right dosage and under the right circumstance protects us ... imaginary fear offers straitjackets instead of lifejackets, nooses instead of safety nets.

My longing to improve my looks via The Body Shop is being replaced by my longing to improve my looks via Photoshop.

If you know you can do it - if you can already chart every day in your future - then why bother? Choose to do something you have more trouble imagining. Take a chance.

I have an intimate relationship with books. After all, I take them with me into the bathtub-not an invitation I offer lightly.

We should remind ourselves that laughing together is as close as you can get to another person without touching, and sometimes it represents a closer tie than touching ever could.

I am constantly surprised that the simple word 'feminism' raises more eyebrows and initiates more sad-faced head-shaking than any elaborate stream of invective I have ever leveled at either the I.R.S. or the D.M.V.

Anger can offer a sense of indignity to replace a sense of shame, and offer a voice-raised above others-which can finally be heard. Those voices are most effective when they are raised in unison, when they have mercy as well as anger behind them, and when, instead of roaring at the anger of old pain, they sing about the glorious possibilities of a future where anger has a smaller house than hope.