“Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-he...”

“And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, sh...”

“Sympathys easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your ...”

“I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forest...”

“Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.”

“Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we'd shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we'd had and those selves we'd been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs ...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.”

“Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.Francois de La Rochefoucauld”

“Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.”