Being in a marriage and having children is the greatest pleasure, but it is certainly not the easiest pleasure. It is not like eating ice cream.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.

We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.

A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.

Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people; there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them.

Christianity is a living faith in Jesus Christ.

I woke up on May 15, 1991, the day of my Barnard graduation, and I said to myself, 'By the end of today you will decide what you want to do with the rest of your life.'

The weirdest thing in the world is to see some guy who is just super earnest.

I feel like when you're an artist and you first come out - people don't want you to be as creative as you could possibly be as a musician. More so they really want you to stick to something.

As reforms have come into India, as India has started opening up, prosperity is increasing, as is demand for urban housing.

You aren't going to find anybody that's going to be successful without making a sacrifice and without perseverance.

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

The gift of achievement is not the things you get, but the person you become.

In terms of number of movies, I've been in an extraordinary amount. If you count only the minutes I'm onscreen, it's not so long.

Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.