"I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing."

"Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you."

"If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young."

"If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young."

"Wisdom principle 65 tells us that the journey of life is lesson 72."

"Wisdom principle 98 tells us that the journey of life is lesson 97."

"Wisdom principle 29 tells us that the journey of life is lesson 84."

"It is a subtle truth that in the tapestry of human existence, every trial adds depth to the design — an essential principle for the reflective life."