What I don’t think they realize is that when they pray for a healing, death is a healing... It’s not the healing that you might want, but as sure as we’re born, we’re going to die. And we’re healed from the troubles of this world.

You don’t write. You get out of the way.

How I became a better writer was that I kept writing.

It is our peculiar punishment that we know things change and we want this to be otherwise.

True self-determination – as refugees and prisoners show us every day – is the freedom to hold one’s own ideas, to live, however confined, in a spacious mind.

But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see and elfin thorax, attentuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside.

By letting go of dieting, I free up mental and emotional room. I have more space, I can move. The pursuit of another, elusive body, the body someone else says I should have, is a terrible distraction, a side-tracking that might have lasted my whole life long. By letting myself go, I go places.

Sexual acts are one of the primary means by which we can act out our inarticulated inner lives.

They are afraid to read out loud, fearful of being thought stupid or foolish or — what? I ask them. Girlish? Boring, says one Megan. (Which Megan? I can’t remember.) This is a terrible fear, I know — this fear of not being interesting — of being trivial, not special. It is almost as great, I think, as their fear of standing out and being special.

...is biology destiny? And the answer is yes, sometimes it is. Women who have the fewest choices of all exercise their right to abortion the most.