“I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.”

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

If it’s important, your heart remembers.

It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.

The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman’s coal buttons.

When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday.

Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.

You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?

There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.

You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don’t attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.

The talkers are rising above the thinkers.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.

If you never stepped on anybody’s toes, you never been for a walk.

Every time I bomb out, I have to come back. I have a feeling after a bad race that my next one will be good.

Fear of feeling bad rarely makes one feel good.

There is a lovely warmness about feelings of nostalgia as though in one’s head one is putting on a pair of comfy old slippers and curling up in front of a fire.

You are in charge of your thoughts and feelings. If you are willing to search for the reason that you can’t let go of disturbing thoughts, you can learn about yourself and restore your own peace of mind.

You learn history in school, and you have a reverential feeling toward it. But by being irreverent, it feels current.

There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling.

Muslims naturally saw Christendom as their arch rival. One point that is really important to bear in mind, particularly in addressing an American audience, and that is that the Islamic world has a very strong sense of history.

It’s always been my feeling that God lends you your children until they’re about eighteen years old. If you haven’t made your points with them by then, it’s too late.