Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

My first months in Sofia were a time of intense disorientation: I had never been to that part of the world before; I could barely speak the language; everything seemed strange to me.

I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist.

Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.

I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.

I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

Tell your good news as an evangelist would. Do so with a passion driven by a need to help and solve problems that some people didn’t even know they had.

Want me to Stevie Wonder my way to the bathroom?

Our weaknesses are divine gifts that when embraced will enable us to make our purposeful contribution to the whole, which is why we incarnated in the first place.

The Christian life is one of faith, where we find ourselves routinely overdriving our headlights but knowing it's okay because God is in control and has a purpose behind it.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time - none ... ZERO.

We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no war. And we none of us believe it.

It seems better to me for a child to have these skills and never use them, than not have them and one day need them," she said.

silence is very moving to youth, for who knows what it hides?

We know intellectually that money can't buy happiness yet we spend and go into debt as if it does.

What else is soul but a listener?