Each of us will have to make the choices that allow us to be the largest versions of ourselves.

Reading is a way to take in the difficult situations and understand them. The whole point of reading a book in class is to have discussion about what these situations are like.

Everyone needs a strong sense of self. It is our base of operations for everything that we do in life.

Don't plan it all. Let life surprise you a little.

Depression is always in the details.

Every writer can tell you that a book is only truly alive when it finds passionate readers who bring it alive in their imaginations.

For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. 'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.