“The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.”

Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.

Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.

Love, the simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it’s too late.

Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.

If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.

The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.

In the year 2025, the best men don’t run for president, they run for their lives.

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.

It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

Sometimes when you’re young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you’re living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two.

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

Get busy living or get busy dying.

The difficulty is not so great to die for a friend as to find a friend worth dying for.

I paint flowers so they will not die.

Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.

Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Live fast. Die young. Be wild. Have fun.

When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

People are dying who haven’t had that opportunity to say yes to the Lord.