…most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.

The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and...

I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or...

…[T]here should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don’t look at your feet to see if you are...

I have these secret pangs of shame about being single, like I wasn’t good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I’d told her once, about the five rules of the world...

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

I think Jesus is divine love manifest on Earth, as it comes through the community of Christians.

I was the angriest daughter on earth, and also, one of the most devoted.

I’ve spent my whole life trying to get over having had Nikki for a mother, and I have to say that from day one after she died, I liked having a dead mother much more...

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a...

I realized I was going to get through this disappointing service, and anyway, you have to be somewhere: better here, where I have heard truth spoken so often, than, say, at the DMV, or home...

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should...

Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe.

The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.

Summer nearly does me in every year. It’s too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.

Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you’re a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you’re...

I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feelings of rage or even unabashed joy – a little bashed joy, here or...

I was terrified of death by the time I was three or four, actively if not lucidly. I had frequent nightmares about snakes and scary neighbors. By the age of four or five, I was...

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose...

Writing like this is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.

Here are the two best prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.

It is unearned love–the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered...

The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you’re only as well as you are.

I’m much calmer as I get older, but I’m still just as capable of getting that strung-out stressed-out feeling of mental and spiritual unwellness.

I happen to be a Christian, but I know that there is one God. People worshipping goodness and love and kindness and truth are worshipping the same God.

I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it.

You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand...

I’ve given guys blow jobs just because I’ve run out of things to talk about.’Oh, Rae. Who hasn’t

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in...

You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.

Some people won’t go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.

If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.

If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever.

I prayed for my heart to soften, to forgive her, and love her for what she did give me–life, great values, a lot of tennis lessons, and the best she could do. Unfortunately, the best...

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have...

It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently-that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely...

And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to...

He is a writer. He makes the rest of them nervous.

My idea of absolute happiness is to be in bed on a rainy day, with my blankie, my cat, and my dog.

Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner’s manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you’re never going to draw another complacent breath again… or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you’d learned...

I’d like to learn to meditate with more enthusiasm. I can sit down and get quiet for 20 minutes, but it just has not been a part of my Christianity at all.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the...

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world,...

Why couldn’t Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us,...

God can’t clean the house of you when you’re still in it.

There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.

We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.