Epictetus say that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don't take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by the...
Those who forget the past tend to regret the future
The trouble with dying, she’d told Jeannie once, is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.
It wasn't what you said, he told her.It was how I felt when you said it.
I really believe that most people who seem scary are just sad.
He was perfect, was how she'd put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red's sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep...
I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get
To my earlier self I would like to say, Relax. The story will come in due time. Trust your characters. Let them tell you what happens next.
She remembered the feel of wind on summer nights - how it billows through the house and wafts the curtains and smells of tar and roses
Past is past... no it's not! People are always fond of saying that, but what's past is never past; not entirely.
It's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.
You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is?
They entered Pennsylvania and the road grew smooth for a few hundred yards, like a good intention, before settling back to the old scabby, stippled surface.
I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do...
He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.
The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.
You think we're a family,' Cody said, turning back. 'You think we're some jolly, situation-comedy family when we're in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place, and our mother was a witch.
There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house.
The thing about caller ID is, Red said, more or less to himself, it seems a little like cheating. A person should be willing to take his chances, answering the phone.
Sugar's cheek was smooth and taut beneath the veil. It felt like one of these netted onions in a grocery store.