“He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.”

Sometimes you have to put your fears in order.

I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.

The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.

But I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.

Let love write on you for awhile.

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they’re nothing.” “So what’s something?” “Being reliable is something. Being good.

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.

Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.

Art can be very political but that can’t be the purpose of art, it can’t be the driving force. It isn’t with any of the books that I love, anyway.

One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.

Songs are as sad as the listener.

I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.

I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up ‘incredibly beautiful’ in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.