“Sometimes I feel as if there's an explanation to my life that continues to escape me; that I've missed something noble, something sublime; that in some way I have cheated myself...life is so strange, so harsh.”

“No escape--like life itself.”

“She wrote that she, too, always felt an outsider "...even to myself.”

“Life is mostly hard and sometimes we don't feel that we have accomplished anything at all. But if, in your everyday life, you do the absolute best at whatever you try, the accomplishment is in the doing”

“The keys to life are running and reading. When you're running, there's a little person that talks to you and says, "Oh I'm tired. My lung's about to pop. I'm so hurt. There's no way I can possibly continue." You want to quit. If you learn how to defeat that person when you're running. You will how to not quit when things get hard in your life. For reading: there have been gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There's no new problem you could have--with your parents, with school, with a bully. There's no new problem that someone hasn't already had and written about it in a book.”

“The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a kind of cultural bipolar disorder, one that too many of us have. The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don’t, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again.”

“Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.”