Thank you, God, for the dignity and beauty of self. The precious innate self. The only thing that can't be taken from us. The only thing we really own.

Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realize you're not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully.

Let me remember that each life must follow its own course, and that what happens to other people has absolutely nothing to do with what happens to me.

What feeling is so nice as a child's hand in yours? So small, so soft and warm, like a kitten huddling in the shelter of your clasp.

Death is the perfect knowing.

simply to ask a blessing upon one's circumstances, whatever they are, is somehow to improve them, and to tap some mysterious source of energy and joy.

A child's hand in yours - what tenderness and power it arouses. You are instantly the very touchstone of wisdom and strength.

The man or woman who treasures his friends is usually solid gold himself.

When you write from the heart, you not only light the dark path of your readers, you light your own way as well.

the habit of shutting doors behind us is invaluable to happiness; we must learn to shut life's doors to cut out the futile wind of past mistakes.

Man is the only creature whose emotions are entangled with his memory.

Listening to music makes me creative in all spheres of life.

Together we all live every momentOn the very brink

And when he invented his hell, that was his heaven on earth.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

Honestly, woman, you call yourself our mother?

There is a skeleton in every house.

In youth, what disappointments of our own making: in age, what disappointments from the nature of things.

I do not aim to be immediately practical but eternally helpful.

This truth: that he, the avatar of light, Supreme Master of the Jedi Order, the fiercest, most impeccable, most devastatingly powerful foe the darkness had ever known... just- didn't- have it.

Ours is not a joy born of having many possessions, but of having encountered a person: Jesus in our midst.