I wrote for twelve years and collected 250 rejection slips before getting any fiction published, so I guess outside reinforcement isn't all that important to me.

Any mother could perform the jobs of several air-traffic controllers with ease.

That's the risk you take if you change: that people you've been involved with won't like the new you. But other people who do will come along.

Just as you began to feel that you could make good use of time, there was no time left to you.

A snake will always be a snake, even if you put a chain around its neck and try to make it walk upright.

Inspiration never arrived when you were searching for it.

One didn't issue instructions to comets. Grown children did what they had to do, and parents could only grit their teeth and watch and pray for them to get through it.

What a surprise to find you could shift the contents of your head like rearranging furniture in a room.

If this was adulthood the only improvement she could detect in her situation was that she could now eat dessert without eating her vegetables.

The requirements of romantic love are difficult to satisfy in the back seat of a Dodge Dart.

Dying was apparently a weaning process; all the attachments to familiar people and objects have to be undone.

Forget that blind ambition, and learn to trust your intuition.

To be ready does not mean it will be easy. It doesn't mean it will be smooth. It means that even when it's difficult, you have what it takes to survive.

Nothing is given to man on earth - struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible - the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen.

The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge.

I know for me, and what the Bible teaches, I want to have a relationship with Jesus.

It's just too egotistical to think that we are the only lifeform in the universe.

This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.

Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.

I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.

They used to be buddies, I thought, they used to be friends, and now they hate each other because one has to work for a living and the other comes from the West Side. They shouldn't hate each other.