But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard

Listening is not merely not talking...it means taking a vigorous human interest in what is being told to us.

First ambitions are best. We are less brave later.

Art, I subsequently realised, is like that. It softens by association and implication. It renders the hard pliable. It creates gaps, gaping holes really, in possibility.

And yet, in terms of its emotive potential, I still find art more attractive, currently, than books, which fail at a deeper level.

Sometimes the heart demands.

The poverty of the villages is almost picturesque from the windows of a coach that is not stopping.

We are, after all, human. There is something wild in those opposable thumbs.

The visit, like all visits home for a long time now, has been an obscure failure. When is it we cease to be able to go back, truly go back? What secret door is it that closes?

Control is an advertising concept.

If the trees and the plants are brothers, if the birds are my sisters, then cats are truly my kin.

An ambitious amateur will rise above a complacent master.

love yourself, be yourself.

'The want of proper examination, true contrition, and a firm purpose of amendment, is the cause of bad confessions, and of the ruin of souls.'

Sometimes we had to improvise. I hate to improvise because I felt like I couldn't find words.

A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring.

There's something grand and revolutionary still about [women] traveling alone. There are some parts of the world where you can't.

Poor soul, she always knew everything about her neighbors, but she never was very well acquainted with herself.

I cannot have survival as my only goal. That would be too boring. My goal is to come back in my best running form. It is good for me to have that goal; it will help me.

My light shines when things get really tough.

How can I follow my heart when it's waiting around for the rest of me to make the decision?