“Instead of a book, what if we're actually writing (or not writing) in the margins of our lives? What if our lives are books? What is the sign of our presence? Are we pressing into the margins our interpretations and questions? Are we circling offending verbs and drawing furious arrows to the margin where we scrawl "irony," "frustration," "voiceless," "unfair!" Or do we simply turn the pages, passively receiving what's given, furiously disagreeing but remaining silent about it?”

“We confuse what is complex (raising a child, finding more meaning in our lives) with what is complicated (sending astronauts to the moon, doing our taxes). Confusing the two, leads us to complicated solutions for things that are actually complex instead.”

“When we know what we most fear, we know what we most care about.”

“We can either own our circumstances and be creative in them, or we can throw up our hands and say, I cannot be held accountable because the conditions are not ideal.”

“Don't say you're a writer if you're not writing. Even if you're writing, don't call yourself a writer. Say instead, 'I write.' It's the verb that's important, not the noun.”

“We give up our power to the very people who took it away from us in the first place.”

“Sometimes our stop-doing list needs to be bigger than our to-do list.”