“The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.”

It’s what you do that makes your soul.

The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.

It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.

She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.

I prefer to remain anomalous.

To think is not always to see.

There are some who’d hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think’s been too 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.

Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.

Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need

Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I’m concerned that’s like accusing a dog of having a bark!

Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.