The sound of his sleep, the snores and sighs and small noices, is company.

I've never seen grief like it. Grief like that, it's like an animal. She's not eating. She's not sleeping. She's whimpering. She's sluggish. She's not herself

You cannot penalize a man for one slip. Then she lay wondering about the word slip. When you slip, you fall, but maybe it is not such a sore fall because you have slipped.

I've started to feel very odd within my own life. It's most peculiar to feel lonely inside your own life.

They never tell you about that either. How the hardest thing a mother has to do is give her child up, let them go, watch them run.

How bizarre, i think to myself, to be on a train and to actually not want to arrive anywhere? What kind of madness is that?

What a thing it is to have music that plays your terrible thoughts. I imagined that one piece could drive more delicate women than myself to insanity.

When it rains like that, dark in the afternoon, you feel like you've been taken into the past.

I didn't feel like I was missing anything. Nor did I feel ambitious any more. It all seemed stupid wanting to be better than the others in the same ring, shallow, pointless.

Children are the bridge to heaven.

After graduation, I was floundering in L.A., doing stand-up comedy and working in a shoe store in the Valley.

We cannot be effective if we continue to cling to the old ways, the old strategies, the old assumptions.

My own thoughts Are my companions.

Books belong to their readers.

The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.

When the gospel flourishes in the church, everything flourishes with it.

What if you woke up this morning and had only the things you thanked God for yesterday?

What is the character trying to say? Why? Be as specific as you can, using sense images that evoke something about the character. Try using the character's senses, even if the character is you.

As a kid I was fascinated with sports, and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports, like books about Baseball Joe, as one baseball hero was called.