In a fire you have to be thoughtful, you have to have a certain kind of intuitive smarts that the veterans have. I'm not there yet, despite the Stanford degree.

You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.

Its hard in the firehouse to avoid the dessert thing. At 3 in the morning after some emergency, I have been known to eat an ice cream sandwich.

Wasn't growing catnip in one's yard the kitty equivalent of giving candy to children?

Fire taps something ancient and vital in each of us, something both snarling and reverential.

When you have cat stealers over for tea, you clean the house, buy bagels and cream cheese, and try to figure out how to trap your guests in a lie.

I think as humans we do want to control our relationships, and you can't. It's probably better that you can't. That wouldn't be a real relationship, and we'd never learn and grow.

To be a writer - write! To be an author - publish! To be a bestselling author - never stop writing!

I just believe in a huge universe of billions of miles.

I recognize limitations in the sense that I've read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare . . . Aside from that I don't think of limiting myself.

Cruelty, as a fine art, has attained its perfect flower in the trained-animal world.

Don't bring your need to the marketplace, bring your skill.

I want women -- and men -- to feel empowered by a deeper and more psychotic part of themselves. The part they're always trying desperately to hide. I want that to become something that they cherish.

The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.

See, that was the problem in relationships when emotion began muddying the waters. It was as if (Lexie) expected him to do or say exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, whatever that was.

There is never the body of a man, how strong and stout soever, if it be troubled and inflamed, but will take more harm and offense by wine being poured into it.

Your boss doesn't care what you know, because the Google machine knows everything. Your boss cares about what you can do with what you know. That's the only thing your boss will pay for.