how can you love a little cat so much in such a short short time?

Life is like a bowl of spaghetti. Every once in a while, you get a meatball.

What I have since realized is that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones.

Man needs bread and hyacinths: one to feed the body, and one to feed the soul.

You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.

I love the way that each book -- any book -- is its own journey. You open it, and off you go. You are changed in some way, large or small, by having traveled with those characters.

Read a lot, live your life, and listen and watch, so that your mind fills up with millions of images.

Sometimes you know in your heart you love someone, but you have to go away before your head can figure it out.

You know, maybe that's all anybody wants, is to be useful. And have somebody else notice it.

Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.

A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.

And have your mother put my head on a stake? Do you have any notion what that would do to my handsome good looks?

The toaster (lacking real bread) would pretend to make two crispy slices of toast. Or, if the day seemed special in some way, it would toast an imaginary English muffin.

The refusal to be committed and the attitude of indifference can in fact never be neutral.

Accept everything just the way it is.

In order to grow, you must accept new responsibilities, no matter how uncertain you may feel or how unprepared you are to deal with them.

Leave as little to chance as possible. Preparation is the key to success.

One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.

I've never had an abortion. And I don't know if I would. But, it doesn't mean that I wouldn't fight to the death for women to make their own choices for their own human bodies.

Wake the happy words.

Make it plain that you have no time for war, that you have more important things to do....let the diplomats and marshals of the earth shoot each other.