My mom was a social worker. I had a pretty good idea of what the authorities can do when a parent's not around.

Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy-and time. The more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you'll start feeling those minute-and-a-half happinesses.

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

There are still things out there in the universe to contemplate and spend our lives chasing.

I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.

If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.

I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.

Let go of your daughter with grace and you'll find her calling on you with joy.

In the past the man has been first

The creeping sense that he might have seen him reading the book came up from the ground, but that was more anxiety than evidence.

I am not an expert in medical field.

Did you ever feel like the whole world was going to a party and your invitation got lost in the mail?

Why should women not be a martyr for her cause?

I don’t need the factory behind me. I just need help getting my music heard.

Mankind will not have peace until it turns with trust to My mercy.

There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility.

There are times in the lives of most of us, when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.