“I get a heavy penance for something I couldn’t help doing. But good or bad, I am a Catholic and I’ll never be anything else.”

From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again.

I hate all those flirty-birty games that women make up. Life’s too short. If you ever find a man you love, don’t waste time hanging your head and simpering. Go right up to him and say, ‘I love you. How about getting married?

She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it

But this tree in the yard-this tree that men chopped down…this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up it’s stump-this tree lived! It lived! And nothing could destroy it.

It was a good thing that she got herself into this other school. It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable.

Occasionally there is a moment in a person’s life when he takes a great stride forward in wisdom, humility, or disillusionment.

Sometimes I say I don’t believe in God and Jesus and Mary. I’m a bad Catholic because I miss mass once in a while and I grumble when, at confession,

Well’ Francie decided, ‘I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life – and nothing else but’.

But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.

What must I do, mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?” “The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read.

All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life its in him to live.

Suffering is also good, it makes a person rich in charachter.

It takes a lot of doing to die.

It’s come at last,” she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn’t enough food in the house you pretended that you weren’t hungry so they could have more.

If there was only one tree like that in the world, you would think it was beautiful. But because there are so many, you just can’t see how beautiful it really is.

Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.

You haven’t done anything wrong. You just haven’t done anything, and that’s what’s wrong.

Suddenly we had become these people who didn’t drink anything but kale, who ended many of our conversations with tears, and for whom no future was guaranteed. It was kind of funny.

Don’t say anything about this to anybody. Any one would say that I am trying to play the good-natured philosopher. I am neither benefactor nor philosopher, but just a human being, and my charities are the pleasantest expense I have on these journeys.

I think I would cease to accomplish anything productive, would quickly dispense with all human contact, and would very well end up with a nasty case of arthritis in my over-used digits from constant gameplay.

More than anything I love being on stage and performing

I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.

The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.

I don’t really think anything Microsoft does puts pressure on Apple.