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

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.

Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It’s just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.

Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.

Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.

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.

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.

You can’t live someone else’s expectations in life. It’s a recipe for disaster.

I guess I’ll never measure up to anyone’s expectations. I surely don’t measure up to what I’d like to be.

I find it really interesting that people are shocked by the raw, natural representation of a woman and a man’s body.

People who believe in a divine creator, trying to live their lives in obedience to his supposed wishes and in expectation of a supposed eternal reward, are victims of the greatest confidence trick of all time.

We don’t have a lot of expectations [for Donald J. Trump] because the American administration is not only about the President; it’s about different powers within this administration, the different lobbies that they are going to influence any President.

Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we’ve made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we’ve loved it to death.

It’s essential to distinguish between events that are really beyond your control and events you caused yourself.

To live in poverty is to live with constant uncertainty, to accept galling indignities, and to expect harassment by the police, welfare officials and employers, as well as by others who are poor and desperate.