It's always good to start off anything by breaking a rule.

LOL-inspiring thought: Wouldn't it

The problem of self-loathing isn't new. What's new is the idea that it's the people with the history of greatest injustice who have the greatest right to be heard, and that the time has come for the...

Why do I think you did it?Because you were trapped upside down in a tankful of water.Because you were weak and in pain.Because you were tired of fighting.

Beware irony, ignore criticism, look to what is simple, study the small and humble things of the world, do what is difficult precisely because it is difficult, do not search for answers but rather...

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

There's a certain kind of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?

They hold each other tightly for a few moments as the dog, a miniature dachshund, barks and leaps at them.

What do dogs think when they see someone cry? Bred to be comforters, they comfort us. But how puzzling human unhappiness must be to them. We who can fill our dishes any time and with as much food as...

Cell phones do not belong in fiction, an editor once scolded in the margin of one of my manuscripts, and ever since - more than two decades now - I have wondered at the disconnect between tech-filled...

It's not uncommon to wish to have known what a person you've come to love was like before you met them. It hurts, almost, not to have known what a beloved was like as a child. I have felt this way...

You write a thing down because you're hoping to get a hold on it. You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion.

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something...

Once, when we were walking together on a campus outside the city, a chipmunk zipped across our path and dove into a hole at the base of an oak tree. Oh, look at that, she said. Just like Walt Disney.

{Socrates to Phaedrus: "I'm a lover of learning, and trees and open country won't teach me anything."}

Rather than, say, Toni Morrison, who called basing a character on a real person an infringement of copyright. A person owns his life, she says. It's not for another to use it for fiction.

Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read. Rebecca West.

At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child' {109}.