Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.

Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.

I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

Academic achievement was something I'd always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.

Desires collide; the wish to eat bumping up against the wish to be thin, the desire to indulge conflicting with the injunction to restrain. Small wonder food makes a woman nervous.

You know the minute you stop thinking about it, it'll happen.

I clench my teeth as tears come. I am fed up. I am fed up with tears and weakness. But there isn't much I can do to stop them. ~ 'Tris

Use your faults, use your defects; then you're going to be a star.

You don't have to be a pastor to let your passion be felt and your voice heard. You just need to be willing to be the first one willing to die.

He who laughs.....lasts.

Well I should be sitting in an air-conditioned office in a swivel chair, talking trash to the secretary. Saying, hey now mama, come on over here.

If you have a lot of what people want and can't get, then you can supply the demand and shovel in the dough.

There is so much noise in the world! May we learn to be silent in our hearts and before God.

Body: A cell state in which every cell is a citizen.

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.