The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me.

I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!

I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.

Their fingers seemed to fit together in just the right way- effortlessly clasped, like perfect complements.

Love is what makes you bloom like a flower with a smile, beauty and fragrance.

People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.

Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.

Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world.

You have to do the work. You have to make the opportunity. It doesn’t find you, you find it.

Now we also need people who just love to listen to the music. And we need people that want to work to facilitate it. That want to do work, have somebody like Bret Primack, the jazz video guy.

We have in England a particular bashfulness in every thing that regards religion.

All things will be clear and distinct to the man who does not hurry; haste is blind and improvident.

I say I’m an atheist but I wouldn’t mind being visited by a ghost.