Strength means...acknowledging each of those feelings, your questions and ideas and faith and terror, and meeting what comes with the full force of your heart.

How anyone becomes herself/is a mystery.

I came to see that what constitutes strength is not just a muscle or will. It can also include the most desperate vulnerability, the saddest heartache, the lightest, sweetest laughter.

Strength means honoring your entire range of emotion, even your despair and heartbreak.

You are not broken. You break again and again because that's what breaking means. To be whole.

What if all possible pain was only the grief of truth?

Death and life are, for most of us, too complex to comprehend, but Alex Lemon can pretty casually, accurately, and marvelously correlate them to heavy metal and birthday cake.

I've been melted into something too easy to spill. I make more and more of myself in order to make more and more of the baby. He takes it, this making. And somehow he's made more of me, too.

Passion is the driving element of purpose. When one is possessed with it, labor is not perceived as toil - it is revealed as love.

Innocence is an infinitely fragile thing and thought can sometimes injure, even destroy it. - Pg. 254

The only truly dead are those who have been forgotten.

I think my biggest revelation was to write entirely from the heart, and to convey emotion, even when it meant forcing myself to feel uncomfortable in doing so.

Nothing unattested do I sing.

Only positive consequences encourage good future performances.

One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.

I'm mad, true. But only about one thing. Horror movies. I love spooks. They are a friendly fearsome lot. Very nice people, actually, if you get to know them. Not like these industry chaps out here

Out of life's storm I carried only a few ideas - and not one feeling.

If your opponent offers you a draw, try to work out why he thinks he's worse off