People like to think the younger generation's job is to steer the world to hell. But it's never true, is it? They're hopeful and good - and that's how it should be.

I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.

Traits don't change, states of mind do.

I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world.

The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.

Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

You surely know that in the course of a long marriage it is not unusual for a husband or a wife to develop a crush on someone else.

I'm so interested in the fact that we really don't know anybody. We think we know the people close to us, but we don't, we really don't.

In a way, I'm very interested in writing about Maine, because I think Maine represents its own kind of history. It's the oldest state, and it's the whitest state.

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything

I do write by hand. I just think - I don't know, it's a physical thing for me. It's a bodily thing. It literally has to earn its way through my hand.

That's your response to everything: drink?""No, that's my response to nothing.

Progress results only from the fact that there are some men and women who refuse to believe that what they know to be right cannot be done.

Its very difficult to determine whether this is the fault of the world that has abandoned the Church, or the Church that does not know how to relate to the world.

If you betray yourself, you are no different from the people who hurt you. What's the difference between those people who hurt you and what you are doing to yourself?

The world consisted of predators and prey. You were either hunting or running.

I have achieved what I set out to achieve when I took over the leadership. The Greens have gone from strength to strength with solid election results and a growing, engaged party membership.

Strategy is all about combining choices of what to do and what not to do into a system that creates the requisite fit between what the environment needs and what the company does.

Communism is a form of society where the less people have to eat, the more they have to swallow.

An interest in the brain requires no justification other than a curiosity to know why we are here, what we are doing here, and where we are going.

Surrender means wisely accommodating ourselves to what is beyond our control.