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

“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.”

“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.”

“Faith is not a feeling, she says. It's a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope.”

“The Lesson You've Gotto learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tearsshed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped.Everyone learns this. Born, everyonebreathes, pays tax, plants deadand hurts galore. There's grief enough for each. My motherlearned by moving man to man,outlived them all. The parched earth'sbare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it.Other than myself, of course.I've made a study of bearingand forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and notethose faces passing by: Not one's a god. ”

“I've plumb forgot where I am for the instant, which is how a good lie should take you. At the same time, I'm more where I was inside myself than before Daddy started talking, which is how lies can tell you the truth.”

“I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.”