A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.

The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.

We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.

They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.

I'm only telling you on the truth, " he said. "If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.

Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.

That's what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.

Pain's nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get.

We are not built for mediocrity, but we build it into our lives nonetheless.

SUMMERthe cattails swayand the bamboodances gently intothe brightness ofa happy day.

When a caterpillar looks in the mirror, he sees a butterfly.

The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

Bill Clinton was relentless, eloquent and truly charming.

I laughed my way through The Stepford Wives.

We make choices everyday, some of them good, some of them bad. And - if we are strong enough - we live with the consequences.

Learning is the gradual replacement of fantasy with fact.

I'm 51. So I'm just saying, 30 years from now you're going to have a different outlook. That's what a midlife crisis is.

Fasting is an amazing thing. It gives people heart and soul.