“When I feel like shoveling in food, the emptiness can be filled only with love(April 2012, O Magazine)”

“Jealousy always has been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed. I’ve had many years of recovery and therapy, years filled with intimate and devoted friendships, yet I still struggle. I know that when someone gets a big slice of pie, it doesn’t mean there’s less for me. In fact, I know that there isn’t even a pie, that there’s plenty to go around, enough food and love and air.But I don’t believe it for a second.I secretly believe there’s a pie. I will go to my grave brandishing my fork.”

“This is where I liked to be when I was hangover or coming down off a cocaine binge, here in the dust with all these dusty people, all this liveliness and clutter and color, things for sale to cheer me up, and greasy food that would slip down by throat.”

“I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: "Thank you.”

“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”

“Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.”

“She said to go ahead and feel the feelings. I did. They felt like shit.”