Before you open the lunch menu or order that cheeseburger or consider eating the cake with the frosting intact, haul out the psychic calculator and start tinkering with the budget.

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.

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.

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.

You are not walking slow enough, when taking a walk, if you do not come across as bored or depressed (to the average sane person).

Never, even in his wildest dreams, had his imagination come close to the reality of her.

ChrysanthemumSilence - monk Sips his morning tea.

He had traded the lives of people he did not know for those of men he did.That was, he supposed, human nature.

Google can bring you back 100, 000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

I am what I am and that's all that I am and if I'm supposed to be somebody else, why do I look like me?

Without courage, all other virtues are useless.

How sacredly do [we] regard the good name of another?...Do we pass on spicy bits of entertaining conversation...repeating rumors and stories which have not been submitted to the test of truth?

I only know how to play one role: me.

In Hollywood, if you don't have happiness you send out for it.