The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism.

[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.

In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.

Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.

Sorrow can be a bully.

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace.

The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes

You don’t deserve my image in your head. You don’t deserve my memories in your chest.

No one is ever alone and silence does not equate defeat.

With us is the Lord our God to help us and to fight our battles.

It’s not really pressure, unless you’re not prepared.

I learned that the moment you want to slow down is the moment you should accelerate.

If you're trying to get out of debt, you have to be willing to treat everything as expendable.

If you don't own Gold, you know neither history nor economics.

So, in the tulip, we have a flower of beauty and grace of charm, refinement and distinction. It is a powerful flower and it knows it

Don't write it right, just write it, and then make it right later.

My problem might be that even if I did go home, I wouldn’t belong there, among people who give without thinking and care without trying.