At twenty-eight I'd had a handful of beaux, but had only been in love once, and that had been awful enough to make me doubt men and myself for a good long while.

It was our favorite part of the day, this in-between time, and it always seemed to last longer than it should--a magic and lavender space unpinned from the hours around it, between worlds.

My life was my life; I would have to stare it down, somehow, and make it work for me.

Sometimes I wish we could rub out all of our mistakes and start fresh, from the beginning,' I said. 'And sometimes I think there isn't anything to us but our mistakes.

Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other. Maybe it was a state of mind.

If I can write one sentence, simple and true every day, I'll be satisfied.

I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else. I know that makes me a sap.

Dogs are easy. If their tails are up and their eyes are soft, you're in.

Not everyone out in a storm wants to be saved

I'd had my share of rain. My mother's illness ... had weighed on me, but the years before had been heavy, too. I was only twenty eight.

She was also incredibly confident, with a way of moving and talking that communicated that she didn't need anyone to tell her she was beautiful or worthwhile.

A house without books is like a room without windows.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra not choreography to the audience.

If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.

How many times can summer turn to fall in one life?

America is a country of laws.

A certain harmony should be kept between actions and ideas if we want to fully develop the effects they can produce.

Bargaining is a repulsive habit; compromise is one of the highest human virtues - the difference between the two being that the first is practised on the Continent, the latter in Great Britain.

There's more to getting to where you're going then just knowing there's a road.

I started in movies in Mexico and started doing telenovelas in Mexico. American Family was the first thing I did in English.

What America needs is a political revolution.