Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailabl….

I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and save the world. You sent money to the Red Cross, you registered peop….

People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved..

Frederick Buechner is one of my favorite writers. The Eyes of the Heart is beautiful and wise, full of insight, charm, and tenderness..

I don't want something special. I want something beautifully plain..

I am all the ages I've ever been..

Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one..

Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subv….

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a ….

But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?.

I also learned that you didn’t come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren’t born a person of cringe and contraction. You wer….

I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my ….

I don't think anything is the opposite of love..

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely f….

only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it..

Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a b….

These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human cond….

Raising a child, whether or not it is yours, is like Nautilus of the heart and soul..

I became a Christian before I got sober. So I was a drunk, bulimic Christian..

When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us..

We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: b….