Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.

Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it’s sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.

My mother was an incredibly loving mother.

I think that we really fool ourselves about our ability to be safe and secure nowadays.

I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.

I had that feeling you have when you’re watching a sad movie, sobbing at the heartbreak you are feeling at the same time that you know the heartbreak isn’t exactly real, that it will be gone by the time you get home and make a cup of tea. I found a lot of life like that when I was younger, as though I was practicing for what came later.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

Young men kill someone for a handful of coins, then are remorseless, even casual: Hey, man, things happen. And their parents nab the culprit: it was the city, the cops, the system, the crowd, the music. Anyone but him. Anyone but me.

Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs.

A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female – a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.