Beatrix, do you know what happens to girls who ask such naughty questions?”“They’re ravished in haylofts?” she inquired hopefully.

You are your own worst enemy. If you can learn to stop expecting impossible perfection, in yourself and others, you may find the happiness that has always eluded you.

No marriage stays in the same pattern forever. It is both the best feature of marriage and the worst, that it inevitably changes.

The trick was forgetting about what she had lost ...and learning to go on with what she had left.

My family has always believed that when we are faced with large and apparently impossible problems, the best solutions are found by the insane people, not the sensible ones.

Take too much time, and time will take you.

... But if I spend [all] my time *reading* about adventures, I won't actually be *having* them.

You thought I was peculiar, ” she said in a muffled voice.His mouth brushed the edge of her ear and settled against her neck. She felt that he was smiling. “Darling love… you are.

She felt tears slip from beneath her lashes, no matter how she tried to blink them back. Her heart was ablaze. It seemed that her entire life had led to this man, this moment of unexpressed love.

War is nothing more than organized insanity. That's why crazy and unexpected tactics work most of the time. When they don't, we won't live to tell about it.

Good means not merely not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.

The first two chapters of any first draft generally need to be cut.

When you're underperforming the index, you go home at night and cry in your beer. It's not fun, but who said this business should be fun. We're too well paid to hang our heads and say boo hoo.

The world is being created every minute, and the world is falling to pieces every minute

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

...To the Dolphin alone, beyond all other, nature has granted what the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage

The trick to getting ahead is to give it the same effort you give to getting even.

Rejection reveals your character.

For each of us, time is a thief of flory. What give meaning to our lives and deaths is love and hope, if we are willing to share and accept