Having a lean and hungry look was frowned upon in my Italian neighborhood where a girl was considered too skinny if she could make her knees touch.

Humor is a show of both strength and of vulnerability: you are willing to make the first move but you are trusting in the response of your listener.

Fear looks both ways but still refuses to cross; fear looks twice and still doesn't leap. ... Fear usually arrives late, inevitably leaves early, and ends up never going out of town at all. Fear is the phantom hand on the back of the neck and the sound of a door opening downstairs when no one is coming home. ... Fear grows poor because it watches others gain wealth but cannot enter the fray; fear grows sick because it eats away at heath even as it fears its diminishment; fear grows old watching others live in ways that seem to threaten-but in reality only enhance-life.

Confessions are like tattoos in that 1) You convince yourself that the immediate pain of going through the process means it won't bother you later on; 2) They are permanent.

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.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who like what they like more than they don't like what they don't like and, in contrast, those who don't like what they don't like more than they like what they like.

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