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

“I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Mi...”

“I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp's Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up sup...”

“I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you...”

“That bar also delineated the realm of sweat and hourly wage, the working world that college was educating me to leave. Rewards in that realm were few. No one congratulated you for clocking out. You...”

“Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher's lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.”

“I think now that this obsession with identifying racism, which I saw so often among Somalis too, was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize...”

“It registers that I am sitting there topless, but this body I am in doesn't feel like mine anymore so the half-nakedness seems irrelevant, like a rumor, something I'm supposed to care about but don't.”

“They feel guilty for having survived so they pretend the bad things never happened Exodus (1960) screenplay”

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.”

“Fear is all in the mind”