“This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger.”

But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think?

It was a fleeting statement, one I didn’t think she’d hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us.

And the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?

That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother’s palm and fingertips.

But I loved George in part because he believed me; because if I stood in a cold, plain room and yelled FIRE, he would walk over and ask me why.

To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.

We’re all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there’s too much thought and not enough heart.

Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

You can ruin anything if you focus at it.

I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.

I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q…

It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.

I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me,

It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.

I am not happy, help me — like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.

When people pile seven things onto one burger, it drives me nuts!

That’s the thing with handmade items. They still have the person’s mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone.

I enjoy the burger joint the same way I enjoy fancy meals.

I always say, ‘Eat clean to stay fit; have a burger to stay sane.’