I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie.

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.

We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one.

I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.