Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks.

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

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.

She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.

Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!

To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.

Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.

The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.

But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.

There is no such a thing as missing the train of your life! Life is very rich and very generous

All that we have and don't have is a grace. Even the awareness of grace is a grace in which we should give thanks."

Handle the little things well

Happiness is not in perfection but it is a perception in the midst of imperfection.

But not all kids are exactly the same, Even when they share the same name.

I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.

When men drink, then they are rich and successful and win lawsuits and are happy and help their friends. Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.

There's no guarantee that the United States will be around 200 years from now.

In the struggle for justice, the only reward is the opportunity to be in the struggle. You can't expect that you're going to have it tomorrow. You just have to keep working on it.

I turn to a life of crime cause I came from a broken family.