I do know that there is no reason for me to drown myself from sorrow since I haven't yet tried to achieve anything great.

Sometimes waiting for a question to finish is like watching someone draw an elephant starting with the tail first. As soon as you see the tail your mind wanders all over the place and you think of a million other animals that also have tails until you don’t care about the elephant because it’s only one thing when you’ve been thinking about a million others.

I know I’m not perfect, but I didn’t think it was fair that they told me one thing and wrote down another.

When Patti Fox broke up with me, I typed her name over a thousand times on my manual Olivetti until the entire page was beaten into a stiff sheet of black ink.

Of course I still love my grandma even after all the awful stuff she did to me, which is scary that you can love someone who is not nice. I guess that is what getting better will do to a person: make you forgive people who have been mean to you.

I want you to take a sleeve of Thin Mints and line them up on the edge of the kitchen counter and when I’m hungry I can just bend over and sweep a cookie into my mouth like I’m scoring a goal in hockey.

Miss Volker,” I said about as politely as I knew how, “do you think you will outlast the rest of these original people?” “I have to,” she said. “I made a promise to Eleanor Roosevelt to see them to their graves, and I can’t drop dead on the job – so let’s get going.

I was always a liar. But one thing I failed to realize about being a liar is that you know when you are deceiving someone else, but when you deceive yourself you believe you are telling the truth.

It’s like when you read a book and you know that the words are important, but the images blossoming in your imagination are even more important because it’s your mind that allows the words to come to life.

Each time I read a book, I cataloged the parts that struck me dumb with envy and admiration for their beauty and power and truth.