She had been living like a hermit herself, in a cramped, seedy apartment in Somerville, spending long hours in the lab. All-nighters had become a regular thing. She didn't have any close friends,...

No one escapes from life alive.

With every breath, the old moment is lost; a new moment arrives. We exhale and we let go of the old moment. It is lost to us. In doing so, we let go of the person we used to be. We inhale and breathe...

Everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody's time.

Dad's death didn't hollow me out the way Helen's had. After all, everyone had assumed Dad was a goner back when he got kicked in the head as a child. Instead, he had cheated death and, despite his...

As awful as he could be, I always knew he loved me in a way no one else ever had.

Once you go on welfare it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You're scarred for life.

What doesn't kill you will make you stronger

No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.

You're in a horse race but you're thinking like a sheep. Sheep don't win horse races.

It's really not that hard to put food on the table if that's what you decide to do.

You can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim

Life's too short to care about what other people think. Besides, they should accept us for who we are

Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope.

I read once that sorrow looks back, worry looks around, and faith looks ahead.

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office...

Run after truth until you're breathless. Accept the pain involved in re-creating yourself afresh. These ideas will take a life to comprehend, a hard one interspersed with drunken moments.

But you were my consolation and joy! Life is a barren, destructive desert, and you alone are the moist, green oasis for the soul to seek refuge in

The woman is life, death itself is crowned with the greatness of truth in her hands.

Everyone is passionate about happiness, but it is like the moon hidden behind the winter clouds

He told himself that he could only survive through madness. Only madness can accommodate faith and disbelief, glory and shame, love and deception, honesty and lies. As for the mind, how can it bear...

I resemble that worm which crawls through dust,Lives in the dust, eats dustUntil a passerby's foot crushes it.

It isn't a brute instinct that keeps us restless and dissatisfied. I'll tell you what it is: it's the highest goal of man - the need to grow and advance . . . to find new things . . . to expand. To...

Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.''Will you be all right?''I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too.

Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from...

To live is to be haunted.

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the...

He thought of all the ways that so many people felt about life. Life was a matter of regret--how could it be anything else? We knew that we would lose the things we loved; we knew that sooner or later...

The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.