You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.

Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.

Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.

Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.

the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.

By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.

For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.

The best things aren't perfectly constructed. They aren't illusions. they aren't larger than life. They are life.

Violence is the repartee of the illiterate

Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

One of the greatest struggles of the healing process is to forgive both yourself and others and to stop expending valuable energy on the past hurts.

I guess I stopped acting when I was 18 and didn't pick it up again until I was 21. That wasn't the plan, though. When I first started at Yale, the plan was to do a movie each summer.

There are three things to beware of through life: when a man is young, let him beware of his appetites; when he is middle-aged, of his passions; and when old, of covetousness, especially.

We debated long over the situation for it is a very difficult question and all of us recognize its difficulty.

Rejoice at the death and cry at the birth: New Orleans sticks close to the Scriptures.

Andy Pettitte is my friend...I think he misremembers.

There are secret opportunities hidden inside every failure.