In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.

Follow your heart, and you perish.

Holidays are enticing only for the first week or so. After that, it is no longer such a novelty to rise late and have little to do.

Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear.

If I hadn't had my children, I wouldn't have written more and better, I would have written less and worse.

Even if heaven were real, and measured as Revelation says, so many cubits this wayand that, how gimcrack a place it would be, crammed with its pavements of gold, its gates of pearl and topaz, like a gigantic chunkof costume jewelry.

Will we ever reach a point when it is no longer necessary to say Them and Us? I believe we must reach that point, or perish.

Know that although in the eternal scheme of things you are small, you are also unique and irreplaceable, as are all your fellow humans everywhere in the world.

The dead don't bear a grudge nor seek a blessing. The dead don't rest uneasy. Only the living.

Why doesn't Prin go and get her own goddamn blistering bloody shitty jelly doughnuts?

I used to think there would be a blinding flash of light someday, and then I would be wise and calm and would know how to cope with everything and my kids would rise up and call me blessed. Now I see that whatever I'm like, I'm pretty well stuck with it for life. Hell of a revelation that turned out to be.

I can't change what's happened to me in my life, or make what's not occurred take place. But I can't say I like it, or accept it, or believe it's for the best. I don't and never shall, not even if I'm damned for it.