What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.

But that's what love is, isn't it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?

It's like the psychiatrists themselves are buying into that stupid belief that therapy is something to hide.

When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires.

I've never been in love, but I've always imagined it--weirdly--like some sort of OxiClean commercial. The TV host shows a scene from an ordinary day, and then takes a big old sponge soaked in love and swipes away the stains. Suddenly that same scene is missing all the mistakes, all the loneliness. The colors are like jewels, ten times richer than they were before. The music is louder and clearer. "Love," the host will say, "makes life a little brighter.

Africa - You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the Hand of God. You watch the slope lope of a lioness and forget to breathe. You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water. In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature. In Africa, in the midday heart, you can see blisters in the atmosphere. When you are in Africa, you feel primordial, rocked in the cradle of the world.

Many of my books come from what if questions that I can't answer, things that I'm worried about as either a woman, a wife, a mom, an American.