“A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.”

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.

Now, see, that’s why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy…the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.

In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career – my anti-job – that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.

I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.

You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.

I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same

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

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.

I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment.