Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

If you want to succeed, make it a study first then practice it and finally live it daily.

Sometimes, being true to yourself means changing your mind. Self changes, and you follow.

Ultimately, knowing God and reading the Word, it helps with patience with people, understanding, empathy and sympathy that they might not have that I have. If God gave it to me, why not exercise it?

It is an axiom of political science in the United States that the sole means of neutralizing the effects of newspapers is to multiply their number.

The road to energy independence, economic recovery, and greenhouse gas reductions runs through the building sector.

It is the artist's job to revere beauty without being enchanted by it, to aim for it but also to aim for truth and goodness - just in case they, and not beauty, are the real things of value.

Angry people attract angry people and live in an angry world and this validates their opinion that the world is angry.

The idea of entrepreneurship applies as much in politics, religion, society and the arts as it does in business.

Tell 'em the truth and they call you a traitor, Talk to 'em honestly and they call you a hater.

She could not trust herself to hope—but without hope, she realized, she had no reason to go on.