Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.

Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.

I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.

Academic achievement was something I'd always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.

Desires collide; the wish to eat bumping up against the wish to be thin, the desire to indulge conflicting with the injunction to restrain. Small wonder food makes a woman nervous.

I am conscious of the fact that the subject of hell is not a very pleasant one. It is very unpopular, controversial, and misunderstood . . .As a minister I must deal with it. I cannot ignore it.

The evaluative habits developed in sibling interactions undoubtedly affect the salience and choice of comparative referents in self-ability evaluations in later life

I am not a product of privilege, I am a product of opportunity.

Everyone who works in the domain of fiction is a bit crazy. The problem is to render this craziness interesting.

You can't fool me. There ain't no Sanity Clause!

Every time you ride, your either teaching or un-teaching your horse.

I don't want to return to the past. I don't yearn for when I was 18 years old. I was in high school then. I had acne. I had a terrible hairdo. I'm sure I was sporting polyester pants.

I always wanted to know what the music behind some music was, or where it came from, and that gave me a point of reference for understanding the music I was listening to.

Some people have vivid imagination, some not so vivid, but everybody has vivid dreams.

All dogs seem to be great linguists, according to their owners. They always understand every word that's said to them.