A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

If you train people properly, they won't be able to tell a drill from the real thing. If anything, the real thing will be easier.

People who keep journals have life twice

Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.

I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.

In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?

Glory in your small dreams, because inside them something bigger may emerge.

Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal.

I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced

Success based on anything but internal fulfillment is bound to be empty.

Normality is a fine ideal for those who have no imagination.

The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.

My visions of the future are always pretty much standard issue. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and there are flying cars.

An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.

I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore. I must try to remember.

I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it.