Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.

There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.