Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me.

I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!

I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.

Looks like somebody's got jungle fever.''That's not even the right kind of racist.

We often become mentally and spiritually barren because we're so busy.

It is not fitting that the evil produced by men should be imputed to things; let those bear the blame who make an ill use of things in themselves good.

Someone comes and drags you in front of the camera, and they're already saying, "Okay, we got it. Moving on." You get one or two takes. So it's a tough job.

I hope my kids learn to put themselves first.

Peace is the work of justice indirectly, in so far as justice removes the obstacles to peace; but it is the work of charity (love) directly, since charity, according to its very notion, causes peace.

The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

I'm pretty much a thrift shop gal. Flea markets on Sundays.