Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you're going to live your life.
It was about forgiving. I understood that forgiveness itself was strong, durable—like strands of a web weaving around us, holding us.
. . . you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder, you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help. . . And then finally, the way through grief is grieving.
I feel like I don't have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.
She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.
Is it love that connects us, is that what it is? I never knew that the feeling I have is regular old love because it's so-intricate. Perhaps there is another name for it, one we don't yet know. I used to think that love was simple and noticeable, like rain falling, so that just as you'd look at your skin and say Water, you would also wake in the morning and say Love. But it has been underneath, this new and old thing I feel, subterranean, silent and steady, like blood, rushing along and along without often making itself known.
From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.
The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.
Control your life through insanity.
so" he asked. She was stunned and amazed-and happier than she'd ever been before. It couldn't possibly be real, she thought-unless she spoke the truth aloud, with Daniel and the rest of the fallen angels there to witness. "I'm Lucinda," she said. "I'm your angel.
Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.