“Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.”

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.” – Mrs. Brown

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.

Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.

The happiest people are the ones with the most community.

She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.

Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.

If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.

More than anything else, I’d like to be an old man with a good face, like Hitchcock or Picasso.

First of all a natural talent is required; for when Nature opposes, everything else is in vain; but when Nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place.

Everyone who believes in God must have His revelation in his spirit, or else what he believes is not God but mere human wisdom, ideals or words. Such faith cannot endure the test.

Don’t put the key to your happiness in someone else’s pocket

I’m always the person who’s taking everyone else’s kid and putting them on my hip, so I’ve kinda always been a mama.

There’s no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.

At some point in time, you definitely have to go drama. Not to say that you’re going drama just because everybody else does it.

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.