Never fall for someone with a body to diet for.
Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.
He [an earnest young reporter] seemed to share the view of many intelligent, well-educated, well-meaning people that, while adult literature may aim to be art, the object of children's books is to whip the little rascals into shape.
I cannot, will not, withhold from my young readers the harsh realities of human hunger and suffering and loss, but neither will I neglect to plant that stubborn seed of hope that has enabled our race to outlast wars and famines and the destruction of death.
Punch after punch after punch. February is a mean bully. Nothing could be worse - except August.
the reason God made February short a few days was because he knew that by the time people came to the end of it they would die if they had to stand one more blasted day.
Still, I kept writing. I had no guarantee that I would someday win awards for writing. Heavens, the only person during that time who seemed to think I could write something worth publishing was my loyal husband. But I always remembered the professor from graduate school who urged me to write and who recommended me for that first writing assignment in 1964. When I protested to Sara Little that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all.
Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died. . . He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life. . . Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense.
I'd just much rather see an ugly person take the trash out than see somebody really pretty taking the trash out.
The resistance of a woman is not always a proof of her virtue, but more frequently of her experience.
We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.