“My worth is not based on the work of my hands despite how feverishly I might work and how audaciously successful I might be. Rather, my worth is based exclusively on the astonishing fact that I am ...”

“I am selfish by habit, but sacrificial by nature. Therefore, Id be wise to develop the habit of following my nature.”

“Ignorance might be bliss, but it also has teeth.”

“Peace is achieved when our conscience rests in the fact that weve engaged in right living, verses believing that living is a right.”

“A life that chooses not to grow is a life that died long before it ever lived.”

“To spin the tale with great flourish but never live the tale is the power of vision strangled to fiction by the fiction of fear.”

“But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are ...”

“You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.”

“A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.”

“...I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday - the longer, the better - from the great boarding-school, where we are for...”

“He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of ho...”

“The Christmas presents once opened are Not So Much Fun as they were while we were in the process of examining, lifting, shaking, thinking about, and opening them. Three hundred sixty-five days late...”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”