“I am responsible for my own existence and happiness.”

“Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider.”

“Self-discipline is the ability to organize your behavior over time in the service of specific goals.”

“Never marry a person who is not a friend of your excitement.”

“The challenge for people today--and it is not and easy one--is to maintain high personal standards even while feeling that one is living in a moral sewer.”

“It is naive to think that self-assertiveness is easy. To live self-assertively--which means to live authentically--is an act of high courage. That is why so many people spend the better part of the...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“Copying Juvvens gaze over the treetops at the edge of the shooting range, he saw the fields of Flanders before his inner eye. Yes, the wide horizon The memory made the corners of his mouth curl sli...”

“Jed thought he understood. It was like when his radios were thrown away. You could shrug your shoulders, put on a face that said you didn't care, but you did and nothing could ever be secure again....”

“What you're looking for is already inside you. You've heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can't buy it, lease it, rent it, date it, or a...”

“You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feela hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of tho...”

“There is a rest that comes when you live out of your sound. Silence is no longer something to be avoided. It signifies a soul at rest.”

“All right, Nico relented. Maybe a little He managed to take off his aviator jacket and wad it into a pillow before he keeled over and began to snore.”