I had not asked to be born. Only to be loved.

Odd: I wish I could believe in reincarnation.Chief Porter: Not me. Once down the track is enough of a test. Pass me or fail me, Dear Lord, but don’t make me go through high school...

When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching...

A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.

What has been is no more. Change has come.

People scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable.

Even if there are moments during the day when all seems normal and when every action of your own and of those around you seems to be unremarkable, the appearance of ordinariness is an illusion,...

Translating the words on the door, he said, “Light from light.” “Waste and void, waste and void. Darkness on the face of the deep,” I said. “Then God commanded light. The light of the world...

I’d had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.

Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility.

Holy men tell us life is a mystery.They embrace that concept happily.But some mysteries bite and barkand come to get you in the dark.

Usually I spare myself from the news, because if it’s not propaganda, then it’s one threat or another exaggerated to the point of absurdity, or it’s the tragedy of storm-quake-tsunami, of bigotry and oppression misnamed...

Jocko likes salty, Jocko likes sweet, but never bring Jocko any hot sauce, like with jalapenos, because it makes Jocko squirt funny-smelling stuff out his ears.

Your past is my Future.

Imagine that you are more than nothing. Evil made you, but you are no more evil than a child unborn. If you want, if you seek, if you hope, who is to say that your...

With lead he shaded love into the woman’s eyes.

Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.

Stormy Llewellyn, a woman of unconventional views, believes instead that our passage through this world is intended to toughen us for the next life. She says that our honesty, integrity, courage, and determined resistance to...

Grief can destroy you –or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it...

Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry...

…in an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist.

If someone invented a thermometer that measured weirdness, it would probably melt under my tongue.

To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it...

Besides, I can’t get to where I want to go by conscious or unconscious suicide. I’ve got my strange little life to lead. Leading it the best I can – that’s how I buy the...

Nothing supernatural has ever harmed me. My wounds and losses have all be at the hands of human beings…

What doesn’t quicken dies. That’s an indisputable truth of life.

In this world only the paranoid survive.

Knowing the names of things is a way to pay respect to the beauty of the world…

Although her eyes are neither golden nor heavenly blue, Terri Stambaugh has the vision of an angel, for she sees through you and knows your truest heart, but loves you anyway, in spite of all...

I need useful work to keep my mind occupied, but I’d like to find work where it’s…quieter.

She says that each of us has his or her role in life, and if we know ourselves well enough to understand what that role is, we will be happy doing nothing but what we...

he knew that fate was only a mythological concept

..the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.

Life, Stormy says, is not about how fast you run or even with what degree of grace. It’s about perseverance, about staying on your feet and slogging forward no matter what.

If she fully embraced life with all its conflicts, she would suffer a breakdown.

People who go to work every day, make sacrifices to raise families, and get through life without hurting other people if they can help it-those are the real heros.

A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death’s patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.

Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can’t eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.

It’s so damn hard to bloom… to change. Even when you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it’s hard. Desire to change isn’t enough. Or desperation. Couldn’t be done without…love,

From all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died. Everyone said it was a...

It’s immeasurably easier to live in a world that’s all surfaces, that means nothing and demands nothing of you.

In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we...

Your this beautiful ship that will sail a long way, and I’d only be your anchor””A ship without an anchor can never be at rest

Perhaps they thought they could bring to this valley only those things they loved, leaving behind all ugliness.We are not, however, a species that can choose the baggage with which it must travel. In spite...

The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of dreams that in centuries of relectless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper...

If this was the best wine that Jim and Nora could afford or, worse, if this was their idea of a good wine – well, sadly, then they were better off dead.

That was the splendid thing about life: Though it was cruel, it was also mysterious, filled with wonder and surprise; sometimes the surprises were so amazing that they qualified as miraculous, and by witnessing those...

…he looked as if nothing hard in the world had touched him…

What will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.

Writing isn’t a source of pain. It’s psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.