“Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.”

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.

The thing is, it’s my own fault. I just can’t put up with a person that won’t go out of his way for me. And that’s what a man is. Somebody that won’t go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.

Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.

Absent significant regulatory or tax changes, and a sharp transition could be disruptive.

Life, it seems, is nothing if not a series of initiations, transitions, and incorporations.

The reason I wrote political satire was because I thought it – politics – was important… that public policy was important. Then I transitioned into books, then into radio.

I think the difficult thing is the transition between TV competition series and going into the actual music industry. There still seems to be a slight disconnect there.

This will make the transition happen with less death and destruction.

If, as we decided in Munich, there will be a cessation of hostilities and humanitarian assistance can flow into Syria – then this will open the door for the beginning of the political transition process.

We do not deny the possibility of peaceful political transition, but we are still awaiting the first case.

To have attained to the human form is a source of joy. What an incomparable bliss it is to undergo these countless transitions.