Remember that that "rude awakening" which your parents and well-meaning relatives threatened you with as a kid is better than no awakening at all.

The god that you dispense with today, will come back as a demon tomorrow.

Falling in love with another man is like falling into a vast vat of yourself. For some men this is ultimately nourishing, for others . . . it is drowning.

Wanting someone so much that his very presence takes your breath away is one of the most thrilling happenings in life. Not getting him in no way diminishes this.

Learn to detest things that do not allow you to be yourself, and embrace things that make that self larger, more thrilling, and voluptuous.

Still water does not only run deep. It runs dangerously.

Try to dwell on the people you'd like to love, instead of all the people you do loathe.

There are two things in life that money cannot buy: health and happiness. Aside from that, it does an excellent job.

There are certain restaurants where you should photograph the food rather than eat it. These are great places to bring a narcissistic boyfriend before you break up.

Learn the absolute pleasure of kindness.

I prefer the "tackiest" person in the world to the stylish person who has no tact.

Turn a bad past into a good future.

But in the cause of science men are expected to suffer.

Every great novel begins with a single word. One word, followed by another and another and another. Sentences forming paths to that dream.

Don't focus on her hiss. Remember her purr.

But the absence of tears wasn't the same as an absence of feeling.

At the time of the Revolution, dogs howled day and night all over Russia.

Jesus wept once; possibly more than once. There are times when God asks nothing of His children except silence, patience, and tears.

Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtle round your ruin'd shed?

It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.

Good Lord, I thought, squinting at the bright glare of a late-July morning. No wonder I slept through this. It was noisy with shrieking birds, and already hot.