There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn't have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I was a bleeding wreck. I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being me.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?

You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair.

There is nothing perfect...only life.

When had my fear of broken plates gotten so grandiose? My desire for extravagant moments so small?