Books

So our job as writers is not to diddle around our whole lives in the dot but to take one big step out of it and sink into the big sky and write from there. Let everything run through us and grab as much as we can of it with a pen and paper. Let yourself live in something that is already rightfully yours—your own wild mind.

His blue eyes seemed to be seeing beyond the locked and crowded room, beyond Haarlem, beyond earth itself, as he quoted from memory: “Thou art my hiding place and my shield: I hope in thy word. . . . Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe. . . .”

proactive people do not demand rights, they live them. Power is not something you demand or deserve, it is something you express.

Until I talked to her, I could only imagine Cha’s New York as a shadowy abstraction of a city, a Gotham of unlit steel and windswept empty boulevards.

Her temperament was distinctly familial to me. She could be me, if I could unzip my skin and release all my fury. If Erin brought out the intellect in me (and my petty envy), Helen brought out what was raw in me.

For example, when Paul sets boundaries on Meredith’s demands, he forces her to become more independent.