Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

His voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street.

To feel alone is to be alone.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

True kindness ennobles the giver

What you shouldn't be must not be allowed to stand on the way of whom you can become.

Only the impossible has any real charm; the possible has been vulgarized by happening too often.

Sometimes in life, we need a few bad days in order to keep the good ones in perspective.

Nonchalance is the ability to remain down to earth when everything else is up in the air.

I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

There is a leisure about walking, no matter what pace you set, that lets down the tension.

So I think in those circumstances, there's some potential that you could see a big pendulum swing like 1994, which people you thought weren't vulnerable all of the sudden get in trouble.

Sin is free, or you cannot make sin out of it.

And then the conditions of safety - or lack of safety - for teachers in public schools, and the disparity between public schools and private schools is shameful.