I was learning the secrets of life: that you could become the woman you’d dared to dream of being, but to do so you were going to have to fall in love with your own crazy, ruined self.
I was frozen like in a dream when your feet weigh fifty pounds each and the danger is almost upon you.
I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead.
I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think t...
I started to cry then, and I cried for a long time without making much noise. I cried and cried like a little kid.
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 alone, orb...
I read a wonderful passage in an interview with Carolyn Chute, the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine, who was discussing rewriting: I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty b...
I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right...
I have become more successful in my forties, but that pales in comparison with the other gifts of my current decade -- how kind to myself I have become, what a wonderful, tender wife I am to myself, w...
I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it, and I don't think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness an...
I can teach them little things that may not be in any of the great books on writing. For instance, I’m not sure if anyone else has mentioned that December is traditionally a bad month for writing. It...
I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place...
His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he's somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he's making dream material visible.
Help is the sunny side of control.
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk...
Everything was coming together by coming apart . . . It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it's painful - just loving them, and breathing with them, and d...
Everything slows down when we listen and stop trying to fix the unfixable.
Domestic pain can be searing, and it is usually what does us in. It’s almost indigestible: death, divorce, old age, drugs; brain-damaged children, violence, senility, unfaithfulness. Good luck with fi...
But as Rumi said, Through love all pain will turn to medicine, not most pain, or for other people; and the pain and failures grew me, helped slowly restore me to the person I was born to be. I had to...
As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don't know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all.