Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard and really amazin… - Anna Quindlen

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

When someone asks you where you come from, the answer is your mother...When your mother's gone, you've lost your past. It's so much more than love. Even when there's no love, it's so much more than anything else in your life. I did love my mother, but I didn't know how much until she was gone.

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."

[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]

The lightning bugs are back. They fly low to the ground as the lawn dissolves from green to black in the dusk. Seeing them, I can reconstruct a childhood: a hot night under tall trees; the Good Humor man, in his square white truck, the freezer smoky when he reaches inside for an ice cream.

The lightning bugs trapped in empty jars with holes on top. "Let them out," our mother said, "or they will die in there." We were careless. We always
forgot to open the jars. The bugs would be there in the morning, their yellow tails dim in the white light of the summer sun, pathetic as they lay on
their backs. We were always horrified by what we had done. As night fell we shook them out and caught more.

I relive the magic of the yellow light without the bright white of hindsight. The little flares in the darkness, a distillation of the kind of life we think we had, we wish we had, we want again.