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" My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach. "

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" Sometimes when I'm at my desk, I'll realize that I have contorted myself completely, and I haven't moved for hours, and that my legs have fallen asleep. I am elsewhere, not in my body, not in the room, not in my house. "

" My dad died when I was 23. His death was sudden and shocking - the result of a car crash - and I never got to say goodbye. "

" Writers are outsiders. Even when we seem like insiders, we're outsiders. We have to be. Our noses pressed to the glass, we notice everything. We mull and interpret. We store away clues, details that may be useful to us later. "

" When I sit down with my notebook, when I start scribbling words across the page, I find out what I'm feeling. "

" If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative. "

" The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty. "

" It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward. "

" I'm an urban person who loves living in the country. "

" Success is so fleeting; even if you get a good book deal, or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: 'What about the next one?' "

" Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand. "

" Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle. "

" I don't think it's possible to separate out the strands of a writer's history, circumstances, life events, and that writer's themes. "

" Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word. "

" I'm a full-time writer, which means I have the entire day to get my work done. But that can also be bad, because that means I have the entire day to get in my way. "

" I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not. "

" As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness. "

" I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible. "

" I had never really felt settled in Brooklyn. I think it had to do with growing up in New Jersey and being someone who her whole life wanted to live in the city, and the city meant Manhattan. "

" We secretly believe that if only we achieve some elusive goal - fitting into a pair of skinny jeans, or redoing our kitchen or getting that promotion - that it will make us happy. But the pain of our insecurity is hidden in all that racing around. "

" I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers. "

" Our pain hides beneath these fluttering, random thoughts that run through our heads in an endless loop. But there's so much freedom in getting to know what's under there, the bedrock. "

" I am devoted to my husband and son. I am devoted to the practices and rituals that imbue our lives with a sense of meaning and purpose, that help me to live my days in the most emotionally and intellectually productive manner. I am devoted to the idea of devotion itself. "

" If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art. "

" I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers - the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue - bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder. "