When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.

As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you; but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

Your thorns are the best part of you.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.

Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic-- even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious.

Omissions are not accidents.

The hands are the heart's messengers.

The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.

When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.

Reality is beyond speech and thought. Only that which can be expressed in words is being said. But what cannot be put into language is indeed That which IS.

I try to stay away from carb-y things at dinner.

No one has the right to judge you, because no one really knows what you have been through. They might have heard the stories, but they didn't feel what you felt in your heart.

Laughter drives shouting away.

Sisters have ways of socializing brothers into the mysteries of girls. Brothers have ways of socializing sisters into the puzzle that is boys.

The impossible we do immediately. The unimaginable takes a little while.

Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.

Yet for better or worse we love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.

Listen, my body is attracted to your body but when you speak it makes my brain angry.

Destiny doesn't control your life, but it does place you on a path. It's how you walk down that path that determines stories I tell.