I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

It takes darkness inside of a person to see it in others.

People are not rain or snow or autumn leaves

When our heart wants to live in purity & do the right thing, God will keep us from falling into sin.

It is a poor critic who says that a lack of effect on them implies all others are insincere in their love.

Will: Have you ever seen what happens to someone with demon pox? First it lies dormant. One begins to turn yellow and green. Then the swelling sets in -Jem: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS DEMON POX.

Whoever said that money can't buy happiness, simply didn't know where to go shopping

Ask photographers to write and they have nothing to say; ask them to talk about their work and they won't shut up.

The moment I fell in love with running, I started forgetting my grief and traumas.

Energy is connected to physical fitness. One of the reasons I stayed at the top so long is that I was tremendously fit. At 36, I was fitter than most opponents ten years younger.

The root of prayer is interior silence.