we have to suffer mosquitoes the size of blackbirds.

It's life. You don't figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and ride.

Maybe people are more like the earth than we know. Maybe they have fault lines that sooner or later are going to split open under pressure.

Good enough is good enough. Perfect will make you a big fat mess every time.

Life is short but it is wide. This too shall pass.

I believe that illness has led me to a life of gratitude, so I consider Lyme disease at this point in my life to be a blessing in disguise.

How wide and sweet and wild motherhood and sisterhood can be.

I value humor, kindness, and the ability to tell a good story far more than money, status, or the kind of car someone drives.

I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

I never claimed to be a low-maintenance gal, but when I'm writing, it's particularly challenging. I lose things constantly: my watch, my glasses, my papers, my mind.

A scent that disturbs me and delights me. It smells like ripe pears, vetiver, a bit of violet and something else- something spicy almost biting and exotic.

The scribbled signature black, onto the blinding global white, onto the thick soupy red.

Money is like manure

I'm dancing when the clouds start crying.

Once you lose the honesty in a relationship, I mean, I think you don't have a relationship at all.

It's a lot easier to like people when they can't make life miserable for you anymore.

People have the idea of missionaries as going out with the Bible and hitting natives with it. It's not really what they were doing. They were all doing something rather different.

Teenagers crave independence. The more self-suf-ficient we make them feel, the less hostile they are toward us.

I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books.

Were one merely to seek information, one should inquire of the man who hates, but if one wishes to know what truly is, one better ask the one who loves