I've always said the toughest thing about learning to feel your feelings is that then you have to feel your feelings.

I've always traveled. I'm a professor in a limited way. I teach one class two quarters out of four, so I get traveling done.

It would have been so perfectly ironic if I had been killed by the dog, because I was petting a dog who was not used to being pet, because I think I'm some kind of dog whisperer, and I think I can make any dog love me.

I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves.

Traveling is my priority, because it drives the writing, so I teach around the travel, and sometimes the travel is the teaching.

Do you write novels?" I said. "Novels, Lord no," she said. "I can't even stay married.

Praise Roxane Gay for her big-hearted self-examining intelligence, for her inclusive and forgiving stance, for her courage and determination . . . for saying out loud the things we were thinking, for guiding us back to ourselves and returning to us what was ours all along.