“What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.”

I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.

Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.

You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they’re not self-sufficient.

Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.

…prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Don’t wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.

It’s what you do that makes your soul.

The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.

It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.