“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching for someone who would change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”
“You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are. Get a life.”
“All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.”
“Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.”
“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.”
“You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.”
“If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.”
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”
“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
“Middle age: when you'll do anything to feel better—except give up what is hurting you.”
“There are glimpses of heaven in every act, or thought, or word, that raises us above ourselves.”
“Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion.”
“If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos.”
“Good times are when people make debts to pay in bad times.”
“Character is made by what you stand for; reputation by what you fall for.”
“If you count all your assets, you always show a profit.”
“A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.”
“Another good reducing exercise consists in placing both hands against the table edge and pushing back.”
“Using money you haven't earned to buy things you don't need to impress people you don't like.”