"Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer."

"Life had been hard on this girl, Jacob, but she had enough courage for an army."

"...guilt is deserved only when the effort to resist evil is never made."

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

"You do what you have to do. That's who you seem to be to me, anyway. You're one who does what he has to do."

"I'm not much for parties. Sometimes you have to wear a funny hat, sometimes they expect you to eat sushi, which is like eating bait. And there's always some totally drunk girl who thinks you're smitten by her, when what you're really wondering is if she'll vomit on your shirt or instead on your shoes."

"Denial couldn't be maintained."

"The dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider it's the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles."

"You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next."

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

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

"If you really truly want to know, I've thought if I was ever free someday, I might discover I've held my tears so long that I can't cry anymore, that I'm a dry stone and nothing can ever be wrung from me."

"I knew that suffering can purify, that it's a kind of fire that can be worth enduring, but there were degrees of it to which I chose not to subject myself."

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

"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 end when their final hours come. They accept death with a grace that I hope I will one day be brave enough to muster."

"Give the narrative a lighter tone than you think it deserves, dear boy, lighter than you think you can bear to give it," he instructed before I began to write, "because you won't find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope."

"Strange how the deepest part of us isn't able to speak more clearly to the part of us that lives only here in the shallows of the world."

"In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life."

"Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages."

"She blinked, sat up, and saw Chris in the bathroom doorway. He'd just gotten out the shower. His hair was damp, and he was dressed only in his briefs. The sight of his thin, boyish body - all ribs and elbows and knees - pulled at her heart, for he looked so innocent and vulnerable. He was so small adn fragile that she wondered how she could ever protect him, and renewed fear rose in her."

"She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells."

"Perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope."

"Life without meaningcannot be borne.We find a missionto which we're sworn--or answer the callof Death's dark horn.Without a gleaningof purpose in life,we have no vision,we live in strife,--or let blood fallon a suicide knife."

"She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote."

"She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce."

"Fate isn't a straight road," I said, becoming the oracle that earlier in the day I had declined to be for her. "There are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path."

"...because wherever else the future leads, it leads ultimately to death, the end that is present in my beginning and in yours."

"These days, all I ask of Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another. This is a big request to make of busy Fate, who has billions of lives to keep in constant turmoil."

"Evil travels the world in anonymity, its presence revealed only by the periodic consequences of its desires..."

"Sometimes you have to break a rule to save the system."

"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 can do best."

"The divine has taken a few steps back from humankind, perhaps in revulsion, perhaps because we don't deserve to look directly upon holy beings anymore.... When the divine enters the world these days from outside of time, it manifests discreetly through children and animals."

"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 from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth."

"I try not to spend too much time on partisan politics. Life's too short for that. I don't really believe that there have been many human problems solved by politics."

"Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.People saw one thing, they swooned over it. They saw this other thing, they pounded it with sticks.Maybe there had to be variety for life to work. Swoon over everything, you get bored. Beat everything with a stick-boring."

"And because we have been given thought, will, and imagination, albeit on a human scale, we too have this power to create."

"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."

"Home was not a perfect place. But it was the only home they had and they could hope to make it better."

"Maybe the devil in human beings isn't the reflection of the devil, perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our kind. Maybe what we've done is create the devil in our own image."

"A high degree of intelligence yes in no other creature in the natural world. That's why nature shuns us and why we subconsciously hate her and seek to obliterate her. High intelligence leads to the concept of progress. Progress leads to nuclear weapons, bio-engineering chaos and ultimately to annihilation."

"Although much that was precious has been taken from me in this life, I have reason to remain an optimist. After the numerous tight scrapes I've been through, by now I should have lost one leg, three fingers, one buttock, most of my teeth, an ear, my spleen, and my sense of fun. But here I am."

"She is a girl who feels things strongly, and though cynics might mock her for that, I never will, as it is perhaps the best of graces: to feel deeply, to care profoundly."

"Money and beauty are defenses against the sorrows of this world but neither can undo the past. Only time will conquer time. The way forward is the only way back to innocence and to peace."

"There's more to me than you see, another me down inside somewhere, full of hate, ready to hurt, cut, smash, or if maybe there's no Other and there's just me alone, then I'm not the person I thought I was, I'm something twisted and terrible, terrible."

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

"I don't know if this deception qualified as a half-step down the slippery slope. I had no sensation of sliding. But of course we never notice the descent until we're rocketing along at high velocity."

"None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another's salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light."

"When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it presents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances."

"It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living."

"If an eighty-six-year-old woman has been clear-seeing from a young age, she will have gone through a lot of life developing a keen eye for snares and pitfalls, an ear for deceit, and a good nose for knavery. And by such an age, a smart woman with no illusions is one to whom courage comes far more readily than it does to those young people who don't yet know the world for what it is."