We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.

Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

By the time we arrived, as evening was approaching, I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.

I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

Weakness : Hang on To Your Worst Nightmares.Petra Hermans

There is something about inside information which seems to paralyze a man's reasoning powers.

If we share our shame story with the wrong person, they can easily become one more piece of flying debris in an already dangerous storm.(page 10)

My God, I have come with the seeds of questions. I planted them, and they never flowered.

The most ordinary conditions for observing sailing birds are then the wind and sea are both aft.

I don't even know Amanda Seyfried or whatever - they're all the same!

Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung

The takeover of Harvard in 1805 by the Unitarians is probably the most important intellectual event in American history - at least from the standpoint of education

Misfortune is the test of a person's merit.

If something sticks around long enough that it makes it to seasonal D.V.D. release, I'll watch it. That's how I watched 'The Sopranos'.