The music world is where child prodigies go to die.

Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn't happen right away.

Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them.

Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.

You can see a person's whole life in the cancer they get.

I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.

Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us.

He sometimes wondered if she had become involved with him just so that she could cry in someone's arms. Maybe she can't cry alone, and that's why she needs me.

Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.

I feel like the queen of the oven! I am the Queen of all oven-dry! Master of heat! You may now address me as "Your Royal Highness"!

The surest way to prevent seditions...is to take away the matter of them.

The discovery of nuclear reactions need not bring about the destruction of mankind any more than the discovery of matches.

People only talk about what a joyous experience it is, but there is terror: Your life, as you know it, is over. It's over the day that child is born. It's over, and something completely new starts.

It's April 15, tax day. The federal tax code is over 74,000 pages long. But stick with it because after page 72,000, it gets really good.

I've seen wonderful stay-at-home moms and moms who could use a little improving.

I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it.

love is always in danger of being sentimentalized.

While 'Buddhism' suggests another belief system, 'dharma practice' suggests a course of action. The four ennobling truths are not propositions to believe; they are challenges to act.

One unanswered question is whether a Euro-Islam that combines Islam with democracy will be possible in the future. We mustn't confuse desire with reality.