But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me... and go on living without me.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me.

I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!

I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.

I love the dark hours of my being.My mind deepens into them.There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.

Feeling anxious or depressed sometimes is part of what it means to be a person, and it might even be essential to success.

It seems to be almost a law of physics, that the winds of change awaken fear and fundamentalism.

From a withered tree, a flower blooms

The more knowledge one person has of the other, the greater the intimacy within the relationship.

I have heard that one can conquer the empire on horseback, but one cannot govern it on horseback.

The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.

A product which is unceremoniously wasted to landfill at end of life surely can't be considered good design!

I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation.