If you could figure out how to live with family then you'd gone a long way toward finding your peace.

It is sort of weird being honored for the worst day of your life.

There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.

As if sorrow is the true reality? Without ever putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory.

America loves to pray, God knows. America prays and prays and prays, it is the land of unchained prayer, and all this ceremonial praying is hard on Billy.

Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die.

I like to kill my enemies and listen to the lamentations of their women

The Canadian dialect of English . . . seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary.

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

Despotism often presents itself as the repairer of all the ills suffered, the support of just rights, defender of the oppressed, and founder of order.

Leadership is an action, not a position.

Africa, being the major target of colonial plunder, therefore becomes a major source of conflict.

The more we listen to God's voice, the easier it is to recognize when He speaks to us.

Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.

A leader is someone who steps back from the entire system and tries to build a more collaborative, more innovative system that will work over the long term.

I know how to give the meaning of a word but not how to give the intention of a word.