Far from making me feel different and special, my [spiritual] experiences made me feel the same, ordinary, and interconnected. If I felt more spiritual, everyone else felt more spiritual as well. (276)

when I talk about a writing life, I'm talking about a life in which writing is the dominant response to living.

Treating myself like a precious object will make me strong.

We don't often talk about the fact that writing is all about rhythm. When you get too up in your head, you can lose a lot of your writing. Sometimes what a writer really needs to do is go dancing.

In our human lives, we are often impatient, ill-tempered, inappropriate. We find it difficult to treat our intimates with the love we really hold for them. Despite this, they bear with us because of the larger, higher level of family that they honor even in our outbursts. This is their commitment.

What we focus on, we empower and enlarge. Good multiplies when focused upon. Negativity multiplies when focused upon. The choice is ours: Which do we want more of?

When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, 'How do you feel?' and you say, 'Oh, I feel okay.' Then you write about it, and you discover you don't feel okay.