“No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give o...”

“In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising tow...”

“When we make our own misery we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change, because misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.”

“Change isn't easy. Changing the way you live means changing the way you think, means changing what you believe about life. That's hard.”

“He would pray...for everyone who knew pain, which meant everyone who wore a human face.”

“For a long time things were so bad. Very bad. Dark even when there was light.The only thing that kept the dark back was the Forever Shiny Thing that was her secret...It is a word...the word hangs o...”

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.”

“Fear is all in the mind”

“A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.”

“The more one judges, the less one loves.”

“[N]one of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us.”

“But people had forgotten there was a day in the not too distant past when theyd not seen or heard of bombings, and suicide vests, and snipers. Alicia, though, had not forgotten.”

“Every morningI wake up with the newsof bloodshed.I feel my body,desperate to know whetherIm still alive.”

“But people had forgotten there was a day in the not too distant past when they’d not seen or heard of bombings, and suicide vests, and snipers. Alicia, though, had not forgotten.”