“Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.”

A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.

I have accepted fear as a part of life – specifically the fear of change… I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.

Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I’m doing something right.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That’s one reason old men can send them to war.

I don’t think you will ever fully understand how you’ve touched my life and made me who I am.

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth)

Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.

Divorce is my generation’s coming of age ceremony – a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.

Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

How could one create life with someone who represented death?

Home is where your books are.

Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye.

We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.

Betrayal betrays the betrayer.

A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.

Cheerfulness ought to be the viaticum vitae of their life to the old; age without cheerfulness is a Lapland winter without a sun.

Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.

People were not charmed with Eglantine because she herself was charming, but because she was charmed.

It’s a divine art to be cheerful.

Fill the bowl with rosy wine, around our temples roses twine, And let us cheerfully awhile, like wine and roses, smile.

I confess I love littleness almost in all things. A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a little company, and a little feast.

Be cheerful, if you are wise.