Why do I find the fantasy - husband, family, kids - exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.

Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.

I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.

Academic achievement was something I'd always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.

The spirit of life is the spirituality of soul.

What if the actual sin was that despite the fact of knowing how cruel and unfair this world is

For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.

A Serving Leader who creates a powerful churn of productivity needs a team that can put itself at the service of others.

Be yourself and think for yourself and while your conclusions may not be infallible they will be nearer right than the conclusions forced upon you.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

The lack of closeness among friends is a fault that cannot be reprimanded without becoming incurable.

As a mom, I always feel I have to protect them. I talk about them because they are the most important things in my life but they are private people. I won't use them for my own press.

Nothing I ever wrote had a message. It was just my own personal experience.

Well, an actor is an actor is actor, to paraphrase someone or other and the opportunity to work, to have a steady engagement, certainly seemed like an appealing concept to me.