Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

People never remeber happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.

Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.

You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

The whole Melrose series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.

I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.

Have we become so defensive that we cannot even tolerate a kind act?

Good spiritual habits and routines turn into better lives.

Every working family in America knows how hard it is today to find affordable childcare or early childhood education.

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.

Stood I, O Nature! man alone in thee, Then were it worth one's while a man to be.

You can't do BIG things when you think "little".

To be useful to others and to be useful to myself is definitely a better place to be.

I don't know how often I can discuss one incident in my entire life, but I'll continue to do that.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art.