When I was young, my peers prepared to endure 20 years of hardship, and if fortunate, perhaps enjoy a bit more comfort in old age. Now, young people want to live well from the start. When it comes to...

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos

Sometimes you don't need lightning to start a fire. Sometimes, it builds on its own.

And he learned that when Johnson gave an assignment, no excuses were accepted. He used to say, 'I want only can-do people.' That was one of his favorite expressions. 'I only want can-do people around....

If you do everything, you'll win

Then she said good night and headed to her room.

The whole school was in shock when he died. Just six months earlier, another guy from school died. Everyone went on about too much tragedy. Want to know about tragedy? Come to my house. A year later,...

Betsy: "Do you have daddy issues, Warren?" Warren: "Dad was supportive, intelligent, read to me as a kid, left me a trillion dollars. It's hard to complain."

And from that time on the boys were no longer called Elder and Younger, but they were given school names by the old teacher, and this old man, after inquiring into the occupation of their father,...

The feet bear the burden of the body, the head the burden of the mind, and the heart the burden of the spirit.

I'll take honest arrogance over fake humility any day.

Certainly, nobody imagined that Mr. Lincoln would order an armed invasion over the affair. When he did exactly that, the entire South exploded with defiance and patriotism, cheering the new...

It is a scholar's task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it's no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a...

My debts were my enemies, but the men I owed were my friends because they trusted and believed in me.

you used to do that. If you hid your face, you thought we couldn't see you just because you couldn't see us.

Look, if some guy dressed in his mother's clothes breaks in, fight him off until I get my pants back on.

You changed what was between us. You took the step, and I didn't see it coming. I can't be sorry for that when I'm so damn grateful for it. I don't know if you were always the one, but I know you're...

You can't just hope for happy endings. You have to believe in them. Then do the work, take the risks.

"So, you're hitting on Clare the Fair." "I'm not hitting on her. I'm exploring the possibility of seeing her on social terms." "He's hitting on her," Owen said around a mouthful of chips. "You've...

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it.

You cannot say to the sun, or to the rain, To a man, geisha can only be half a wife. We are the wives of nightfall. And yet, to learn kindness after so much unkindness, to understand that a little...

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come...

In fairy tales, love strikes like lightning. In real life, lightning burns. It can even kill you.

Great designers produce pleasurable experiences.

Why do people buy an expensive, complicated toaster when a simpler, less-expensive toaster would work just as well? Why all the buttons and controls on steering wheels and rearview mirrors? Because...

There seems to be a conspiracy, one calculated to destroy our sanity by overloading our memory. Many codes, such as postal codes and telephone numbers, exist primarily to make life easier for machines...

Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible signals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more...

blissful as ignorance

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your casual gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves...

My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium step.'Sounds like a...