Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways.

When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.

I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.

Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board.

Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer.

People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.

All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.

It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.

Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.

Hands can cook, hands can create, hands can kill. There is no better tool than our hands.

Life runs in a narrow path to balancing act, convincing tact, and satisfying fact.

He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage he won't encounter many rivals.

I do not believe, given her past decisions and comments on the reasons to go to war in Iraq, that Dr. Rice will be able to represent the United States without a predetermined bias from the war.

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

I'm not prepared for holding office any more than I think Arnold is.

I try to visit people in hospitals when I can, smiling and joking while I'm there. But when I leave, I just start crying.

Self-deception is nature; hypocrisy is art.

Survival," I said softly. "It's selfish, and it's dark, and we've always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.

Most people are only too delighted to wreck each other's heads. And for the tiny minority who do their pathetic best not to, this world is going to go right ahead and make sure they do it anyway.