What goes on in our heads solely determines the level at which we function in society, our physical health, and the degree of our mental and emotional stability and maturity.

A healthy PFC means a healthy cognitive grip over the world with very little elements of prejudice.

Some adventures should never be repeated.

You do not need to be temperamental or upset to be a novelist. Don__ embrace the tortured artist rhetoric that any life difficulties might serve to benefit and enhance your writing. That__ damaging. Counterintuitive. Writing can be so incredibly lonely, and when you__e alone with your thoughts for long enough to produce a hundred thousand words of your own headspace, it can be scary. Suffering is not good for your art. Mental health care is. So talk to someone other than your future readers about the problems you are facing. Someone you know and trust. There is no shame in asking for help.

I am here because I worked too hard and too long not to be here. But although I told the university that I would walk across the stage to take my diploma, I won__. At age fifty-seven, I__ too damned old, and I__ look ridiculous in this crowd. From where I__ standing in the back of the hall, I can see that I am at least two decades older than most of the parents of these kids in their black caps and gowns. So I__l graduate with this class, but I won__ walk across the stage and collect my diploma with them; I__l have the school send it to my house. I only want to hear my name called. I__l imagine what the rest would have been like. When you__e had a life like mine, you learn to do that, to imagine the good things. The ceremony is about to begin. It__ a warm June day and a hallway of glass doors leading to the parking lot are open, the dignitaries march onto the stage, a janitor slams the doors shut, one after the other. That banging sound. It__ Christmas Day 1961 and three Waterbury cops are throwing their bulk against our sorely overmatched front door. They are wearing their long woolen blue coats and white gloves and they swear at the cold. They__e finally come for us, in the dead of night, to take us away, just as our mother said they would.

Denny thought our parents needed a combination of material goods and temperamental changes before he could return home. __f Dad buys Ma a car, then she__l love him, and they__l get back together and she won__ be all crazy anymore,_ he said. For years he held out the possibility that those things would happen and all would change. __f we had more things, like stoves and cars,_ he told me at night in our bedroom, __nd Ma wasn__ like she is, we could go home.