I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

The part of us that has to be burned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but . . . what we are meant to be.

The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way.

Sometimes when we aren't looking, the holiness comes breaking through like a rainbow.

No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.

I got so discouraged, I almost stopped writing. It was my 12-year-old son who changed my mind when he said to me, "Mother, you've been very cross and edgy with us and we notice you haven't been writing. We wish you'd go back to the typewriter. That did a lot of good for my false guilts about spending so much time writing. At that point, I acknowledged that I am a writer and even if I were never published again, that's what I am."