Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.

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.

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.

Desires collide; the wish to eat bumping up against the wish to be thin, the desire to indulge conflicting with the injunction to restrain. Small wonder food makes a woman nervous.

Heureux sont ceux qui peuvent aimer et haïr sans feinte, sans détour, sans nuance.

Good breeding a union of kindness and independence.

We have now armed to such an extent as the world has never before seen.

I often buy myself presents. Sometimes I will spend $100,000 in one day in a posh boutique.

I havent won on my birthday since college, so its good to play hard and get a win by double figures.

When I was on 'Idol' and 17, everything was so new. Everyone is so nice and wants to see you succeed.

History records endless struggles to enlarge those realms, inspiring ones; it also records painful reversals and setbacks.

Do not disturb the faith of any. . . Our duty is not to disturb the faith of others.

The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness.

Thirty-five is half a life. I can't lose the other half. I've lost so much living as a shadow of a person.