Raising people is not some lark. It's serious work with serious repercussions. It's air-traffic control. You can't step out for a minute; you can barely pause to scratch your ankle.

You have to speak your dream out loud.

And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.

Appreciation is the purest,strongest form of love. It is the outward-bound kind of love that asks for nothing and gives everything.

How seriously can I take myself? I'm just one of six billion people, right?

The mother is the most essential piece on the board, the one you must protect. Only she has the range. Only she can move in multiple directions. Once she's gone, it's a whole different game.

We're never ready for the things that happen. When the big stuff happens, we're always looking in the other direction.

He defined me first, as parents do. Those early characterizations can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime.

That to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages--becomes a metaphor for all of life's most meaningful endeavors.

I am an average mother in almost every way, so yes, much to my regret, I do yell at my children.

I didn't know adults could be changed. I thought they were finished pieces, baked through and kiln dried.

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

As for women who were pretty, intelligent, strikingly sensual, the daughters of rich families—they would only have served to disrupt my carefully ordered existence

God wants the church to become the initiator of the reformation and changes in the society

The ability to discern truth comes from learning, growing, and understanding the Bible.

It's cool now to play golf.

Investigation?" Isabelle laughed. "Now we're detectives? Maybe we should all have code names." "Good idea," said Jace. "I shall be Baron Hotschaft Von Hugenstein.

To become self-educated you should condemn yourself for all those things that you would criticize others.

To eat and drink without a friend is to devour like the lion and the wolf.

Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.

My warning is: Be careful Angela Merkel. If you don't see the suffering that has been imposed on the rest of the European people, then Germany will make itself hated.