Did you feel guilty cursing God--you, of all people?' No,' he said. 'Because even in doing so, I was recognizing there was a greater power than me.' He paused. And that is how I began to heal.

In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.

There is a time for hello and a time for good-bye. It's why the act of burying thing seems natural, but the act of digging them up does not.

If you hold back on the emotions--if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them--you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your heard even, you experience them fully and completely.

Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what's interesting to you isn't necessarily interesting to a reader.

I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never even realized I was doing it.

You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship