You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. - Anne Lamott

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

She had come planning to swim, which I hadn’t as the water is too cold for me, and she took off all her clothes, right there and then. “Do you feel shy?” I asked as she walked to the bank. “Nope. This here is what I done got. This is what me being alive looks like now."

When people know you too well, they eventually see your damage, your weirdness, carelessness, and mean streak. They see how ordinary you are after all, that whatever it was that distinguished you in the beginning is the least of who you actually are. This will turn out to be the greatest gift we can offer another person: letting them see, every so often, beneath all the trappings and pretense to the truth of us.