“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”

People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.

People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.

You have a good heart. Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it’s not.

I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.

If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.

And did I pass?” The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left, the younger woman said, “You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.

He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn’t occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.

Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.

You’re always you, and that doesn’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

Words save our lives, sometimes.

When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.

Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination.

What else is chance but the rude stone which receives its life from the sculptor’s hand? Providence gives us chance, and man must mould it to his own designs.

Going in one more round when you don’t think you can – that’s what makes all the difference in your life.

In the marriage union, the independence of the husband and wife will be equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.

Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure another chance in life.

I want to say to you that there is life and dreams and surprises after 30-and 40, and 50, and 60, and 77! Believe me, life is one long surprise.

In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman’s heart until she bows down to it no longer.

life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of ‘family.

Service to a just cause rewards the worker with more real happiness and satisfaction than any other venture of life.