She glances back before stepping into the alley, and she catches her grandfather looking at her the way he does sometimes--as if she's already gone, as if he's practicing sorrow.

Sometimes when reading aloud to my husband, I'll start crying. It completely stuns me. As if the words in my body and on the page - in relation to each other - are cocooned against my own feelings about what I'm writing until they're loosed in the air and become their own. Then I realize what I may or may not have done.

The generation of women who came before us did much of our shouting. They laid the groundwork and now we can be calm and constant and steady.

What does it mean to be Catholic and not a Catholic? I feel adrift, homeless. My Catholic imagination allows me to see the soul as a lit breath, seeking the divine. It persists.

Love is a luxury. It's something that people are allowed to indulge in when they're not simply trying to survive and keep other people alive.

When a colleague of mine had a notable New York Times book, I said, turn one of the chapters in the collection into a pitch for a novel and sell it to your publisher.

I'm a writer of faith. I was raised Catholic, and I have a deeply Catholic imagination.