But you learn to smother the living breathing soul, go deaf to it, and this violence to the self is what is commonly called sanity in the places where I have lived.

I was very far away. My real life had gone underground and could not be seen by anybody. The person at the surface that everybody saw was no longer me.

Everybody likes to see the loner hitched. It tells them everything is right with the world.

All a person does in a moment of suffering is to suffer. There is not room for anything else.

I wanted impossible things. I wanted my life with her before it all turned bad. What I had been given had been taken away and now I was even less than before.

To live a more balanced life, glance at the past, live in the present, and focus on the future.

..why sit on the sidelines of life at any age?

When someone holds a knife to your throat it's easy to be scared. It's not hard to imagine what it would be like.

Leisure is gone,--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.

Entitlement is the opposite of enchantment.

I like a good challenge. And I like to feel that I'm always learning something new.

Forgiving others is easier when I remember that I'm human and stupid, too.

If you can see yourself more than just a victim, aha, now you've got the place to move into that is much more vital and creative and is resourceful than being a victim.

My strong point is not rhetoric , it isn't showmanship, it isn't big promises - those things that create the glamour and the excitement that people call charisma and warmth.

I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with "expressing" myself with obscure creative impressions.