We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you

Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.

Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.

Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.

Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.

I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall.

It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others by means of love friendship indignation and compassion.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I'm the bionic woman. I have a very strong constitution, and I take excruciatingly good care of myself.

You will never know God's strength until He has supported you in deep waters.

A worm tells summer better than the clock, The slug's a living calendar of days; What shall it tell me if a timeless insect Says the world wears away?

The mole rat is the only rodent born without a fur coat. With a good lawyer, someone would pay for that little oversight.

All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.

If we believe something does not exist unless we measure it, then we put aside: love, feeling, intuition, art and philosophy.