Sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

Where your money goes, there your heart follows.

the matured understands mistakes as a necessary growth path to maturity

A lot of people think I'm that guy in 'Betsy's Wedding', but I'm not. What it is for me is that, on some level, I connect with the character emotionally.

I never thought to ever ask for money. I was so stupid.

Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.

Our focus must always be on building people up.

Just like we did in Japan, in South Korea. Just like is happening in Iraq. Laura [Bush] and I feel very strongly that if the United States were to leave.

Throw away profit and greed, and there won't be any thieves.

A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England

Great music is great music, period.