“the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners”

Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

Everything truly important is washable.

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.

I don’t bring expectations to any of my books. I don’t tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

I’m widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I’m not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.

There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.

Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it’s going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.

Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.

Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they’re afraid to plant themselves?

There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.

My sense of insecurity keeps me alert, always ready to correct my errors.

Choices will continually be necessary and — let us not forget — possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them.

Unfortunately, the more complex the system, the greater the room for error.

To live life is to make a succession of errors. Understanding this can bring us great ease and forgiveness for ourselves and others.

Science progresses not by convincing the adherents of old theories that they are wrong, but by allowing enough time to pass so that a new generation can arise unencumbered by the old errors.

It is important that we forgive ourselves for making mistakes. We need to learn from our errors and move on.

The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data.

Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.