If you had really loved something, wouldn't a little bit of it always linger?

Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation.

I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done.

Living in a rural setting exposes you to so many marvelous things - the natural world and the particular texture of small-town life, and the exhilarating experience of open space.

You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.

Libraries are what is best about us as a society: open, exciting, rich, informative, free, inclusive, engaging.

One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day.

A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky, unbidden, and seems like a thing of wonder.

An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.

Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.

Making the ungrateful grateful will bring tears to your eyes, tears of blood bleeding from the heart.

Life is too short not to look beyond it.

Love is an endless mystery, because there is no reasonable cause that could explain it.

Some donkeys have amazing luck.

Nature does not make mistakes. Right and wrong are human categories.

I've always thought that comedy was just another dramatic expression.

He'd told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn't offered morphine.

The best trick I learned was when a priest came to me when I was an altar boy and said, "Always, when you make a mistake, pretend it's ritual." It's beautiful!

Don’t play that game with me, Acheron. Tell me what I need to know! (Xypher) Nice tone. We should rent you out to record Halloween albums. (Acheron)

Body armor. Four thousand pounds of body armor. And missile-proof glass? Nice. What had happened to good old-fashioned bulletproof?