December's wintery breath is already clouding the pond, frosting the pane, obscuring summer's memory.

Here's what I've learned - people will hurt you, but you don't have to respond: Not every mean comment or cruel act deserves to be noticed.

Freshly cut Christmas trees smelling of stars and snow and pine resin - inhale deeply and fill your soul with wintry night.

The winter is kind and leaves red berries on the boughs for hungry sparrows.

I hear the sounds of melting snow outside my window every night and with the first faint scent of spring, I remember life exists

Dark furrow lines grid the snow, punctuated by orange abacus beads of pumpkins - now the crows own the field.

You think so logically... like a hawk soaring - I feel so chaotically... like a kite without a tail plummeting to earth.

I love it when the dark bottle of night spills out, and the Moon writes in chalk about us.

It must be hard when you are a beautiful woman and no one will look at your soul.

Sunday evenings are heavier than clouds with rain, darker too and often interminable.

I'm shy in person - so afraid to confess my love - I need a go-between - our mutual friend, the Moon.

That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.

Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.

Hiring people is an art, not a science, and resumes can't tell you whether someone will fit into a company's culture.

Find the right people, not the best people.

The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.

I like who I am now. Other people may not. I'm comfortable. I feel freer now. I don't want growing older to matter to me.

Every day after work, my mom and I go shopping. My dad is about to kill me. I say, We need it, daddy!

My body's in such bad shape I wear prescription underwear.

Men hate more steadily than they love.

A stable Iraq at peace with its neighbors will remain elusive until we improve both the security and the economic environment in Iraq.