Money in the hand is real - coins and bills. The rest I don't believe in, and I don't think I ever did, really. What's a check, after all, but a promise - mine, the bank's. Me, I know, but the bank?

Worrying is one of my few forms of prayer.

Measure the hate you feel now, and the shame. That quantity is your capacity also to love and to feel joy and to have compassion.

To praise one thing is not to damn another.

What do you do with mother love and mother wit when the babies are grown and gone away?

"I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else"

There is nothing that you can do to me that my own craziness doesn't do to me smarter and faster and better.