Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.

Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

We are the breakers of our own hearts

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

The worship of power is an old religion.

All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.

With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.

A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at the end, for a pleasant death.

The first thing a kindness deserves is acceptance, the second, transmission.

Birds buildbut not I build; no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine,O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked. “Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.

It's in my blood to tour. It's in my blood to get on the road. It's in my blood to go onstage.

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

I’m a Jersey girl, no one can knock me down