This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives.

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you

Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.

Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.

Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.

Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.

A relationship will only go as far as you both want it to.

Failure. It doesn't exist. 'Failure' is just what happens when we lose perspective.

You carry your past with you even if you don't remember any of it.

It has always been, and still is, my intention to build a playground in Central Park.

Many faux pas of fashion can be avoided if you curb your instinctive desire to buy things with your heart instead of your head.

Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.

A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection

In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last 45 years, and only rarely a writer.

There's a real feel-good warmth to the show [The Flash]. It feels like you're watching, for lack of a better analogy, Friends mixed with Spider-Man or Batman.

We should spend as much time in thanking God for his benefits as we do in asking him for them.