Truth, when we are fortunate enough to find it, is like bad-tasting medicine. It rarely comes as a pleasant surprise, because if it surprises us, it means we've been denying it for some time and have a lot of beliefs based on falsehood. It's hard to give up those beliefs.

Good people do not let others suffer needlessly.

I think you don't grow up until you stop worrying about other people's purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.

Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.

The only process you've mastered is the process of elimination, and the only reason you've mastered that is because you can do it in the toilet.

That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.