We were never a family that had a lot. We had enough, but not a lot.

I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.

My job as the mother of daughters is to make sure my children see that every opportunity is available to them.

Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before.

This diagnosis is a reminder that this is the life you've got. And you're not getting another one. Whatever has happened, you have to take this life and treasure and protect it.

It's just a part of our nature to hope.

... all things are possible if you are willing to put yourself on the line. You cannot stand back and hope for the best. You have to act.

You recognize a survivor when you see one. You recognize a fighter when you see one.

A lot of people have great hope, and a lot of people who have great hope live. And, some of them who have great hope die. So it's not that hope is going to save you.

Tabloid news is tabloid news.

We have a middle class that lives on a razor blade. So sometimes when you say poverty, you neglect a large portion of the population.

Change starts with imagination

Where you travel to, I would love to receive a beautiful postcard.

In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.

I was totally into jazz in my teens.

I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am.

Learn from the past, but don't live there. Build on what you know so that you don't repeat mistakes.

I didn't want to lift weights and get all big; I just wanted to get cut.

[The disestablishment of religion] may not have been such a good idea.

However wretched a fellow-mortal may be, he is still a member of our common species.

And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness