The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable.

Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities - for success, for happiness, for really living - are waiting.

True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity - in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.

...It's more important than ever that we find new ways to cultivate curiosity - because our careers, our happiness, and our children's flourishing all depend upon it.

Part of the problem with positive thinking, and many related approaches to happiness, is exactly this desire to reduce big questions to one-size-fits-all self-help tricks or ten point plans.

...no matter how much success you may experience in life, your eventual story - no offence intended - will be one of failure. Your bodily organs will fail, and you'll die.

I came to understand that happiness and vulnerability are often the same thing.

The more you give the less your poor

There should be a little gap between you and your friends, though you'll miss their companionship and you'll also miss their disrespect.

It's particularly hard to take being stabbed in the back close to home. There's always a feeling of betrayal when people of your own group oppose you.

Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.

I'm just an average woman with average concerns.

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.

The difference between a good and great officer is about ten seconds.

This guy in high school tried to run me over with his dad’s SUV. Bad shoved the vehicle through a store window.” The memory brought a smile to my face.

I think Australians do well here because we feel a bit naughty, like we're in America and if they only knew how much fun we were having, we'd all get thrown out, you know.

A taste of righteousness can be easily perverted into an overweening sense of self-righteousness and judgmentalism.