You are always in my thoughts. When you were little, I knew your whereabouts at any given moment. Now that you are…off on your own, I still always know where you are, because I keep...

Are these real diamonds?” I once asked, and she said, “Why have them if they’re not?

The best thing that can happen to me when I’m writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I’m writing at all. It’s as though I enter into a kind of trance. I...

I was downstairs, reading.”” Now?” I strained to see her face. She was smiling, it appeared.”Yes, now,” she said. “It’s nice, sometimes, to read in the middle of the night. The sky is so dark...

I don’t hold Travis anymore, of course- not to read to him, or for any other reason, either. I wish I’d known that the last time was going to be the last time.

I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection has turned into...

The seasons tell us, everything in organic life tells us, that there is no holding on; still, we try to do just that. Sometimes, though, we learn the kind of wisdom that celebrates the open...

Isn’t it really true that life is so beautiful because it’s so fleeting and fragile?

The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their...

You don’t get everything all at once. You wait.

There are some things you never say good-bye to

There are moments when we think nature happens just for us, and there are other moments when the ridiculousness of that notion is revealed.

He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the good place, and a heart-shaped leaf lay trapped in the hollow if his throat as though it were planned, though of course it...

She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is...

Hey. Know what happened to me today?”He sits back and crosses his arms, smiles. “No. What happened to you today?””Well, I decided to take the bus to work instead of driving? And I got on...

Now he understood. After a while, pain simply stopped. It was as though your mind was able to create a firewall beyond which it would not let you venture. You had to have a break...

I cried until my eyes swelled shut, and then I slept, a black, dreamless sleep from which I awoke amazingly refreshed, at least until I remembered.

Now, on this road trip, my mind seemed to uncrinkle, to breathe, to present to itself a cure for a disease it had not, until now, known it had.

We are assumed to be rather hopeless — swallowed up by incorrect notions, divorced from the original genius with which we are born, lost within days of living this distracting life.

Human beings. They are the ones with the most important job. They are supposed to make what they want out of what they are given.

I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.

I just want to say one thing. If I ever write a novel again, it’s going to be in defense of weak women, inept and codependent women. I’m going to talk about all the great...

There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.

I think it’s a real gift to be able to say that what’s in your life is enough. It seems most of us re always wanting more.

People like to be addressed specificlly, it makes them important.

I turn off the radio, listen to the quiet. Which has its own, rich sound. Which I knew, but had forgotten. And it is good to remember.

But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I’ve always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so...

Don’t let your habits become handcuffs

This is the way things work sometimes, that good things get ideas from each other, say, well now let’s go ahead and let her have it all.

I think, actually, that none of us understands anyone else very well, because we’re all too shy to show what matters the most. If you ask me, it’s a major design flaw. We ought to...

I made cranberry sauce, and when it was done put it into a dark blue bowl for the beautiful contrast. I was thinking, doing this, about the old ways of gratitude: Indians thanking the deer...

It’s all right.” To whom? I wondered later.

There are random moments – tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing...

When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.

It seems like all the time people are making themselves themselves, but they don’t really know it. You can only have true visions when you look behind. A person can slide so fast into being...

This is one rule about mixing boys and girls: that a date always comes first.

Nothing helped until the day she took a tablet and pencil into the basement and moved the event out of her and onto paper, where it was reshaped into a kind of simple equation: loss...

There I was, waiting, afraid I’d never experience the kind of joy yet to come, but hoping for it just the same.

You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.

If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.

Life comes with problems, you have to accept that. And you have to try to lead the simple life; to not constantly ask questions about the whys and the wherefores of everything.

How are poets able to unzip what they see around them, calling forth a truer essence from behind a common fact? Why, reading a verse about a pear, do you see past the fruit in...

It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry.

I would make an anonymous call and say, this is someone who cares, do you know what kind of children you have?

…wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want.

When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a...