The genius of a folk melody or story is not the feeling that it's original but quite the opposite - the feeling that it has existed all along.
A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky, unbidden, and seems like a thing of wonder.
Everything rational and sensible abandons me when I try to throw out photographs. Time and time again, I hold one over a wastebasket, and then find it impossible to release my fingers and let the picture drop and disappear.
You may never learn the names of any of the people you talk to in a dog park, even after many, many hours spent there with them, and many hours of conversation. But if - knock on wood - anything should ever happen to your dog, these nameless non-strangers will rally, sympathize, offer to help, and hold your hand. I know this from experience.
College athletics are so entrenched and enjoyed by so many people that they will never be discontinued or substantially changed. I know that. I just pity the people caught in that tender trap. And most of all, I pity those kids.
You can find out anything you want about a car now, and especially every bit of information about the price, without relying on the dealers.
Having animals in the city is entirely different from having animals out in the country. For one thing, it's more social. When you live on lots of acres without neighbors within a stone's throw, your dog-walks are usually solitary rambles over hill and dale.
Keeping animals, I have learned, is all about water. Who even knew chickens drank water? I didn't, but they do, and a lot.
Oversized houses, like oversized cars, seem to be a particularly American fixation.
I wonder what book signings will be like when most of the books we read are electronic. Will authors sign something else? A flyer, perhaps? A special kind of card devised for the purpose?
I am dismayed to realize that much of the advice I used to parcel out to aspiring writers has passed its sell-by date.
Recently, I have come to assume that any call to my landline is from a telemarketer or an automated call from Terminex, letting me know that our regularly scheduled pest-extermination service will occur on its regular schedule. So I usually ignore my home phone.
I once had a boyfriend who couldn't write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt, which I thought was really weird, because this was a long time ago, and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts, let alone neckties; it was like he was a grown-up reenacter or something.
Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.
When it comes to consumer electronics, I'm a big fat sucker, because even though I know you should never, ever buy anything until the second version of it is released, I just can't resist. I live in a state of perpetual Beta.
Here's a habit I never thought I'd develop: I gravitate to anything online that's marked 'most popular' or 'most e-mailed.' And I hate myself a little bit every time I do.
Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it's all gone sideways.
To my great surprise, Twitter is not housed in a silver pod that orbits Earth at supersonic speeds, vacuuming up and then dispersing digital bits of worldwide chitchat; it's in a big, bland office building in downtown San Francisco, near a bowling alley and an Old Navy.
