there is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love.

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset.

A life without love is like a tree without fruit.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.

Learning is nothing without cultivated manners, but when the two are combined in a woman, you have one of the most exquisite products of civilization.

If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it's moving you away from your goals.

Creativity is one of the last remaining legal ways of gaining an unfair advantage over the competition.

Even when the urgent is good, the good can keep you from your best, keep you from your unique contribution, if you let it.

At least we should learn to understand our fellow beings, for we are powerless to stop their misery, their ignominy, their suffering, their weakness, and their death.

I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future.

People talk about opportunity knocking, but the gate was always swinging in the breeze before I got to the door.

From Samuel Adams to Patrick Henry to Benjamin Franklin to Alexander Hamilton, all the Founders intended religion to provide a moral anchor for our liberty in democracy.

Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky! Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound? Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?

Healing is a choice. It’s not an easy one because it takes work to turn around your habits. But keep making the choice and shifts will happen.