“I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away.”

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.

But then it passed, as all things do.

When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.

In many parts of the world, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.

There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

It’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.

And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.

But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.

It’s a funny thing… but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.

You’re gutless. It’s how you were made. And that’s not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you’ve never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is God help him.

It doesn’t matter how much you flirt the whole day, at night you’ll always end up thinking about the one you truly love.

I watch how the moon sits in the sky in the dark night, shining with the light from the sun, and the sun doesn’t give light to the moon assuming, the moon’s gonna owe it one.

Now on Friday nights, if I want to go hang out with friends, I go hang out with friends. If I want to stay in and be in the hot tub and have people over to watch movies, I do that.

For each new morning with its light, For rest and shelter of the night, For health and food, for love and friends. Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.

Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night.

Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.

The moon, like a flower in heaven’s high bower, with silent delight sits and smiles on the night.

Good Night, Goodnight, Dream.