"The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof."

"The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away."

"She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on."

"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."

"Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place."

"But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run."

"God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves."

"Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow."

"I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room."

"What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness."

"The changes we dread most may contain our salvation."

"I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book."

"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."

"The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes."

"There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet."

"A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul."

"In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can."

"Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin."

"It's what you do that makes your soul."

"Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier."

"The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know."

"It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell."

"If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread."

"The truth needs so little rehearsal."

"It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known."

"Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws."

"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."

"But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom."

"Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it."

"Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side."

"Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals."

"Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives."

"To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know."

"How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them."

"No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill."

"Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations."

"If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk."

"I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you."

"Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me."

"A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it."

"Morning always comes."

"Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life."

"If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."

"The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep."

"I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved."

"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."

"I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench."

"Love weighs nothing."

"...I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them..."

"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."