I have become a pupil of the AA movement rather than the teacher.

Honesty with ourselves & others gets us sober, but it is tolerance that keeps us that way.

True ambition is not what we thought it was. True ambition is the profound desire to live usefully and walk humbly under the grace of God.

No personal calamity is so crushing that something true and great can't be made of it

In God's economy, nothing is wasted. Through failure, we learn a lesson in humility which is probably needed, painful though it is.

We know that permanent sobriety can be attained only by a most revolutionary change in the life and outlook of the individual.

Guilt is really the reverse side of the coin of pride. Guilt aims at self-destruction, and pride aims at the destruction of others.

We lose the fear of making decisions, great and small; as we realize that should our choice prove wrong we can, if we will, learn from the experience.

Because of our kinship in suffering, our channels of contact have always been charged with the language of the heart.

AA is no success story in the ordinary sense of the word. It is a story of suffering transmuted, under grace, into spiritual progress.

Almost without exception alcoholics are tortured by loneliness.

Happy the man, whose wish and careA few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native airIn his own ground.

If you think I am BAD than you’re wrong, I'm the worst.

I do not believe that I will ever write an adult novel from an animal's point of view unless someday it becomes suddenly appealing to me to make a narrator a mentally ill pet. Never say never.

Every day a question mark.

We all have some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering it was an acquired one.

The so-called feminist writers were disgusted with me. I did my thing, and so I guess by feminist standards I'm a feminist. That suits me fine.

The human heart has a staggering capacity for love.

It isn't necessary to be socialists in order to love Pertini. Whatever he says or does, smells of cleanliness, of loyalty and of sincerity.

Girls and boys respond to stress differently - not just in our species, but in every mammal scientists have studied. Stress enhances learning in males. The same stress impairs learning in females.

All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.