Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

His voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street.

To feel alone is to be alone.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

Miranda doesn't dream, she simply rests. When Miranda's eyes are at ease, her mind is at peace.

I want to make sure I remember what real ugly is. I might want to tell my grandchildren someday.

That's what they should teach us here. How girls' brains work... It would be more useful than divination, anyway...

People who read always have something interesting to say.

However great the advantages given us by nature, it is not she alone, but fortune with her, which makes heroes.

I always regarded people who want fame with a lot of suspicion. Unless you have a product to sell, I don't know why anyone would want to be famous. I can't imagine what need that would fill.

God, provide me with enough sustenance that my family is taken care of, that neither I remain hungry, nor does my guest go unfed.

Vulnerability, like he had the power to hurt her or pleasure her in a way no other man could. For the first time, he was uncomfortable with the idea of having complete power over her

I heard the call to give up all and follow Christ into the slums to serve Him among the poorest of the poor. It was an order.

To survive is to win.