You are your own beginning. Every day, every hour, every minute, you start again. There is no point wishing you were someone else, you are who you are—start there.

Tell me about your day, your routine, and what you did at the drugstore when the dumb little girl charged you five cents instead of five dollars. Did you speak up? Are you all so...

She starts to cry. ‘It’s just so terrible,’ she says.’Which part?,’ I ask.’Being human.

How can I tell anyone that there has always lived within me a rusty sense of disgust-a dull, brackish water that I suspect is my soul?

There is a world out there, so new, so random and disassociated that it puts us all in danger. We talk online, we ‘friend’ each other when we don’t know who we are really talking...

The subjects range from the pastoral (sniffing of the butt of a melon to tell if it’s ripe. and almost romantically lush descriptions of lightening storms sweeping across fields on summer nights) to elaborations on...

There are strangers, people we don’t know, who care about is.

If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.

Suddenly, she doesn’t want to die. She has no real reason not to, no sudden revelation, except that it’s equally pointless to die as not to die. Why doesn’t she die? She lives because she’s...

Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better – does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?

For the first time, I understand that, as much as one might desire change, one has to be willing to take a risk, to free-fall, to fail, and that you’ve got to let go of...

Maybe you have to do one small thing and then another small thing.