I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.

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.

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

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.

I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.

I forgive, ” Penny said. “But I don’t forget. I’ll remember the kind of gum you were chewing when you did me wrong.

Some thoughts are like old piece of belongings that need to be disposed to move on.

Remembering the past should help you create a purposeful future, not cause you to be afraid of it.

It's easy to love humanity when you're this far away from it.

You don't sell a commodity, you sell joy, gaiety, excitement. You aim at people's hearts, not their minds.

[My mother] pretty much used to go along with my dad in that she wanted me to get an education so that if this incredible dream I had didn't work out, I would have something to fall back on.

I never heard a Christian sermon preached in a church.

We are living now. We shall not live long. No one should tell us we shall live again. This is our little while. This is our chance.

If I call it pain, and try to touch it With my hands, my own life, It lies still and the music thins, A pulse felt for through garments.