“I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.”

“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...”

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

“Teach all men to fish, but first teach all men to be fair. Take less, give more. Give more of yourself, take less from the world. Nobody owes you anything, you owe the world everything.”

“Respect? Of course, always, to all, because everything seems funnier when you're trying to show respect.”

“This desire to govern a woman -- it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does." He thought. "Yes -- really in a better way. ...”