... people who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.

You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.

Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.

It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?

Reluctance to begin is quick to befriend procrastination. . . .

In each man's heart there lies a hole. A dark abyss of need, the filling of which takes precedence over all else.

His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

It was such a pleasure to sink one's hands into the warm earth, to feel at one's fingertips the possibilities of the new season.

There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.

But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

Contradictions are the impossible chasms that create forever separations. God is the forever bridge that creates impossible reunions.

Sadie heard her inside cleaning up the kitchen and wondered what dreams Betty's mother had for herself, if all mothers had them, bottled up beneath their mother exteriors.

What studies say the number one best way to start an exercise habit is to give yourself a reward that you genuinely enjoy.

I totally related to Cole Porter's magnetic pull to any piano that was in the room, which he was famous for doing, as was Gershwin. You couldn't drag them away from a piano.

You can't do God's work without suffering.

Sometimes we have to go deep inside ourselves to solve our problems

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

Sadness comes, joy comes, and everything passes by. What remains always is the witness. The witness is beyond all polarities.

The egg cackles and lays the chicken.

I'm not religious. I love what Clive James said the other day. James is a brilliant writer, but he keeps on writing poems on stuff. And he said, "God doesn't have a leg to stand on."