The worst gift is a fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.
Everything has been said and everything has been done, but you still feel like you are looking for something.
To read is to cover one's face. And to write is to show it.
I knew little, but at least I knew that: no one could speak for someone else. That although we might want to tell other people's stories, we always end up telling our own.
I was going to be a memory when I grew up.
Every story, every poem, every written piece is about belonging. There is a me, there is a we, there is an us, and we want to belong to it or we don't want to belong. You can read every story with this as its main focus.
I remember thinking, without pride of self-pity, that I was not rich or poor, that I wasn't good or bad. But that was difficult: to be neither good nor bad. It seemed to me, in the end, the same as being bad.
A coach can be like oasis in the desert of a runner's lost enthusiasm.
That's what a conscience is made of, scar tissue. . . Little strips and pieces of remorse sewn together year by year until they formed a distinctive pattern, a design for living.
The heart has eyes which the brain knows nothing of.
I think doctors have really come up to speed and understand that more women than men die of heart disease. [But] all the research on heart disease has really been based on men, and needs to be updated with research on women - even very early-stage research is done using male rats!