Should; shouldn’t; ought; oughtn’t – the enemies of contentment.
A gust of wind snatched at her hat. She jumped from the wall and her skirts blew everywhere. I couldn’t avoid glimpsing more than she intended, and I feared that she might have been embarrassed. Instead she laughed and said, “You’re seeing my true colors,” and I was the one who blushed.
Guns discommode me. Their facility alarms me. Point and kill. Ruin someone’s life. Remove at a finger pull deeply loved people, as important in their spheres as the sun in the sky. The very weight of a gun disturbs me-an insolent object, insisting on its own importance.
Every pain is a lesson.
I never met a librarian worth his or her salt who didn’t perceive my passion for books.
The difference between a friend and an enemy is friendliness.
Do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting.
Stick a lighted candle up your backside to give yourself that inner glow.
Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
Find your soul and you’ll live. Lose your soul and you’ll die.
For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war – bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.
As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work – physically – in the same way.
Writers have opinions – that, in part, is why they write. Therefore they have strong likes and dislikes.
I’d have to struggle to find a subject in which I can’t get some kind of interested pulse started.
There are some places you love with your heart, and there are some places that you love with your mind- the places that you love with both are called ‘libraries’
Marriage is the gold standard of all relationships. It’s the currency by which everything is valued.
Start with the difficult and when it gets easy, everything else is easier.
I believe the world of the spirit is in general greatly neglected and not at all served by the practice of faith as we know it, because religion isn’t individual enough.
The human face does not always reflect the beauty that may repose in the soul.