Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you figure out what you have to say.

Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you're good, bad things can still happen. And if you're bad, you can still be lucky.

A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.

Marriage is one long fit of compromise, deep and wide.

There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof.

The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners.

Hope is a renewable option If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't._