“I believe friends enclose us, like a pair of parentheses. Each one knows us differently, each sustains us in a different way.”

In high school, my desire for friendship far outweighed my talent for it.

Step out from behind the words. When you’re a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they’re not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

We grow too old to lose old friends.

Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.

You know how a river goes on and on? That’s my love for you.

Nothing erodes [a mother’s love]. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things-hard as the rock of this earth.

Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.

Words are the weights which hold our history in place.

Nature is not the number-one mystery, I’ve learned. It’s the heart that takes top honors.