I'm just like this. I have no talent for choosing my battles. Life seems, strangely, like a battle to me. The whole thing.

The night is a strawberry.

Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a person’s bookcase and their grocery cart, she’d pretty much know who they were.

The four sayings that lead to wisdom: I was wrong I'm sorry I don't know I need help

Life is change. If you aren't growing and evolving, you're standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead.

Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.

No good ever comes from putting up walls. What people mistake for safety is in fact captivity. And few things thrive in captivity.

But you want murderous feelings? Hang around librarians," confided Gamache. "All that silence. Gives them ideas.

Better to accept the wretched truth than struggle, twisting to make a wish a reality.

When someone stabs you it's not your fault that you feel pain.

Where there is love there is courage, where there is courage there is peace, where there is peace there is God. And when you have God, you have everything.

[R]aising children ... was about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest.

Don't recide in the past. Instead, refer to it, else you will remain in the remand of high demand but with low command

It’s complicated. He’s not…' Human? 'He’s playing hard to get.

There is a virtue, I must presume, in shamelessness, since by placing on parade the things one does not know, one discovers that no one else knows either.

I am not the first to note the vast differences between the Wall Street protesters and the tea partiers. To name three: The tea partiers have jobs, showers and a point.

I used to have a sort of spiky haircut and it just feels better to have short hair again.

Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals - for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.

Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.

There is no condition of life in which we cannot abide in Jesus. We have to learn to abide in Him wherever we are placed.

In youth, grief comes with a rush and overflow, but it dries up, too, like the torrent. In the winter of life it remains a miserable pool, resisting all evaporation.