“As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.”

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.

Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.

I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.

Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

Height isn’t something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.

School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.

You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.

If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business…I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.