Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.

Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.

I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.

Academic achievement was something I'd always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.

When a Lady chooses to Change Her Mind, ' said the Mouse with a touch of hauteur, 'a Gentleman would consider it no more than her Privilege, and not Badger Her About It.

Patience is a virtue as they say and listening is an exercise in patience.

Human beings are drawn to cats because they are all we are not — self-contained, elegant in everything they do, relaxed, assured, glad of company, yet still possessing secret lives.

You need a very good financial person to keep you honest, and to keep track of income and outgo.

It is impossible for a hatless woman to be chic.

No more will, no more soul, no more life!

As time passes, you will look back with twenty-twenty hindsight, and you will say, 'Thank God He did not answer my prayers' or 'Thank God He answered my prayers,' whichever the case may be.

To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema.

I don't put labels on myself.

Once we take our eyes away from ourselves, from our interests, from our own rights, privileges, ambitions - then they will become clear to see Jesus around us.