“It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.”

“Nothing was a more powerful compass of my mood or a better indication of my self-worth than the number on the scale.”

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change. The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. I still didn't know the difference.”

“The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.”

“[I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.”

“I hadn't been able to trust since the age of four. I was torn between wanting to be cradled and telling the world to go fuck itself, and those were opposite sides of the same coin.”

“What I want to know it whether we're supposed to change or just accept who we are?”