If you don't want somwone to change your life for you, you've got to change it yourself. (Vanishing Acts, pg. 339)

Everytime I look at a zebra, I can't figure out whether it's black with white stripes or white with black stripes, and that frustrates me.

Love is not a because, it's a no matter what.

The human capacity for burden is like bamboo- far more flexible than you'd ever believe at first glance.

There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.

There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing -- light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light.

You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.

Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.

The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they'd lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.

If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?

‎Pick ten strangers and stick them in a room, and ask them which of us they feel sorrier for - you or me - and we all know who they'll choose.

The potential in many environmental issues is that if you undertake corrective action without appropriate understanding of the problem, then you wind up doing more harm than good.

If anyone asks me whether I like being a popular writer, I ask them whether they think I'd rather be an unpopular writer.

A little old lady sitting at the front of the bus can do nothing to change civil rights.

I feel really connected to these young ladies I get to work with; I'm dancing around with them and playing music for them. We sit down and get to know each other so we have a shorthand.

I write because I must. It's not a choice or a pastime, it's an unyielding calling and my passion.

With options thus foreclosed, in order to protect and defend the nation and clear the obstacles that stood in its path, a decisive appeal to arms was made.

Seeing the sun, the moon and the stars, I said to myself, 'Who could be the Master of these beautiful things?' I felt a great desire to see him, to know him and to pay him homage.

There's a pressure regardless of that to do a good show.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

Shalvis makes me laugh, makes me cry, makes me sigh with pure pleasure.