When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on… - Anne Lamott

Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

"These lines of D.H. Lawrence are taped to the wall of my office:

"What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them."

I under[stand] that failure is surely one of these strange angels."