The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy.

I was happy without having sought happiness.

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

Just as you learn from a teacher, so you can observe and learn from the educator we call nature.

With enough hope, you can set a fire to find the way out of the darkness.

I wouldn't want to be a talk show host. That's another awkward compliment people make. 'You should have your own talk show.' And I think, no thank you.

Happiness comes, I know, from some spring within a man — from some curious adjustment to life.

If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

Other forms of relating to God that have unique value in connecting us to Him include contemplative prayer and centering prayer.

I am endeavouring to see God through service of humanity; for I know that God is neither in heaven, nor down below, but in everyone.

We are turning our grief into winnable actions.

I know what falling off the cliff means. I know from being considered a very bright kid to being considered like a moron and dropping out of school.