A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, "Oh God," and my father answering cozily from the silo, "Were you calling me, dear?

Try the Lamentations of Jeremiah. They always pick me up.

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.

We are nothing but a string of gut on a stick of bone riding this piece of astral soot for one piteous splinter of eternity.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.