There was always some germ of joy, some little paramecium of happiness wriggling around, waiting for a chance to get out.

Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy-and time. The more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you'll start feeling those minute-and-a-half happinesses.

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

There are still things out there in the universe to contemplate and spend our lives chasing.

I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.

If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.

I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.

Well first of all, tell me, is there some society you know of that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed?

With high hope for the future, no prediction is ventured.

The world is a wheel, and it will all come round right.

I knew dating the son of Satan would turn out badly

I went to school on a military base in Germany. I got a lot of my clothes at the army surplus store.

Our theology is still in a time of crisis, and I think this will last for some years more.

We're diversified, we're stable and consistent. Our businesses benefit from each other.

We must devastate the avenues where the wealthy live

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

When we open to love, we become love.