When we're able to resign ourselves to the wishes that will never come true, there can be enormous energies available within us for whatever we CAN do.

There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

Mutual caring relationships require kindness and patience, tolerance, optimism, joy in the other's achievements, confidence in oneself, and the ability to give without undue thought of gain.

The greatest gift you ever give is your honest self.

Knowing that we can be loved exactly as we are gives us all the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest of people.

Often when you think you're at the end of something, you're at the beginning of something else.

Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.

Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.

Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.

Imagine what our real neighborhoods would be like if each of us offered . . . just one kind word to another person.

"The tradition of the new." Yesterday's avant-gard-experiment is today's chic and tomorrow's cliche.

I really don't know what to do when my life is not chaotic.

Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form.

I find it incredibly difficult to write anything that's really happy.

The half-hour before dinner has always been considered as the great ordeal through which the mistress, in giving a dinner-party, will either pass with flying colours, or lose many of her laurels.

Five thousand people in one society might do something, but five thousand societies of one member each would be a holy trouble.

It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.

My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.

It's as simple as this. When people don't unload their opinions and feel like they've been listened to, they won't really get on board.

One accident or terrorist strike involving high-level waste would endanger lives and cause a catastrophe that would leave millions of dollars in damages and take years to clean up