To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision, one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially, but simultaneously.

That's the trouble with honorable mentions: they let everyone know you applied and didn't win.

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

This kind of split makes me crazy, this territorializing of the holy. Here God may dwell. Here God may not dwell. It contradicts everything in my experience, which says: God dwells where I dwell. Period.

I will write myself into well-being.

One of the blessings that comes with parental territory is that children tug you into experiences you're pretty sure you'd never otherwise contemplate.

I felt permanently exiled from 'normality.' Whether imposed by self or society, this outsider status - and not the disability itself - constitutes the most daunting barrier for most people with physical impairments, because it, even more than flights of steps or elevators without braille, prevents them from participating fully in the ordinary world, where most of life's satisfactions dwell.