How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn't heal?

Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

By the time we arrived, as evening was approaching, I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.

I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

The point wasn't always to do what you want. The point was to do what you did and to do it well.

Similes are like songs of love: They much describe they nothing prove.

If God's Word is not absolutely and completely true, it is too weak a cable to fix our anchorage and guarantee our eternal peace.

The best things in life don't make sense

Here's how you know that you're really drunk: when you get into a taxi cab and you think the fare is the time.

She goes from one addiction to another. All are ways for her to not feel her feelings.

Britain can be proud of its response to the tsunami appeal.

I'm liver than Jay, Davy, and Kathy and Regis, been on more MTV shows than Butthead and Beavis.

Y'know, the real reason why I was such a failure in the sense of being unable to make any sort of a living was because I was really not motivated. I had no motivation.

And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?" "The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra.