...dread invades the living room, finds her on the couch, presses on her, gets inside her where it swiftly grows bigger than she is until she is inside it, looking out from a rind of shadow.

It's important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.

Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.

Depression is anger slowed down; panic is grief speeded up.

Piece by piece living is hard to do. It may even feel like the hardest thing. But it has this going for it: you never need to know what it is you're carrying on your shoulders.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead.

Lies like that are not a sin, they are a sacrifice.

They are so young, they forget that the world is not as in love with them as they are.

Do you think there's such a thing as a ghost who masquerades as a person? Do you believe that there are people whose bodies are still alive here on earth but whose souls are already in hell?

The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.

I don't say goodbye very easily, Anna. Not gracefully or prettily.Goodbye tears your heart out and leaves it a feast for carrion birds who happen by.

Work is a blessing when it helps us to think about what were doing

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

...distinction between growth and development. Aggregate growth in national economic indicators need not mean an improved life for the majority of the people.

You are worthless to others if you don't know your own self and self-worth.

…to celebrate by making love the first snow of winter.

You should never ask a horse or an actor to do something they cannot do. Wisdom will teach you to find out what they can do and then make it easy for them.

Acting school was summer camp, and I needed concentration camp. I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.

there is direction but there is no destination

Where you criminalize people living with HIV or those at greatest risk, you fuel the epidemic.