“Jack Speight undid me, then I almost undid myself. But I've undone some of the bad, too, some of the damage. With help. With luck and love.”

“I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. "There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red Smith once commented. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

“Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.”

“That melting pot stuff was always more about what this country wanted to believe about itself than the way people really felt.”

“Sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked.”

“People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them -- to feed them or fix them.”

“Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they're away? To come home and keep you safe?”

“Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.”

“Change what you can, accept what you can’t, and be smart enough to know the difference”

“We are like water, aren’t we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too.” And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance.”

“Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference.”