"I didn't want to be one of those women who wake up at 63 years old and realize they've missed the window of opportunity for marriage and children."

"America's a very traumatized society."

"What's that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I'm able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I'm older. Thank God for growing up."

"Courage and willingness to just go for it, whether it is a conversation or a spontaneous trip or trying new things that are scary - it is a really attractive quality."

"I feel sorry... for people who've had skinny privilege and then have it taken away from them. I have had a lifetime to adjust to seeing how people treat women who aren't their idea of beautiful and therefore aren't their idea of useful, and I had to find ways to become useful to myself."

"If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young."

"Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better."

"A resilient spirit knows that authenticity is the rarest and most beautiful asset."