If his mother was drowning and I was drowning and he had to choose one of us to save, He says he'd save me.

Suffering makes you deep. Travel makes you broad. In case I get my pick, I'd rather travel.

Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.

Eventually we will learn that the loss of indivisible love is another of our necessary losses, that loving extends beyond the mother-child pair, that most of the love we receive in this world is love we will have to share--and that sharing begins at home, with our sibling rivals.

If we are the younger, we may envy the older. If we are the older, we may feel that the younger is always being indulged. In otherwords, no matter what position we hold in family order of birth, we can prove beyond a doubt that we're being gypped.

But it's hard to be hip over thirty when everyone else is nineteen, when the last dance we learned was the Lindy, and the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbara Streisand were trying to do something about it.

[On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.