Some people seem to understand this - that life and change take time - but I am not one of those people.

We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

I hate the summer.

I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.

I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it.

I would seriously rather be in a long line at the DMV than eat with people I don't know.

I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.

I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.

If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.

If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever.

No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.

Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.

The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.

These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.

Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.

We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.

A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light - in other words, through life - registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith.

Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you're at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it's your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt.

I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.