Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

I have a room, which is in my brain, and it's very, very, very... untidy! There is stuff fallen everywhere. There are some very important ideas next to some very silly ones. There is a bottle of wine...

Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.

Decker blinked awake and sat up in his bed. He looked around, for a few moments unsure of where he was. Virginia. Quantico. The FBI gig. Right. He got up and padded to the bathroom. After that he...

The least I could do was be kind to his mother and sister. It didn't occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self -...

I AM ALWAYS ALONE. BUT JUST NOW I WANT TO BE ALONE BY MYSELF.

It's a rare person to face who they truly are and not run from it -- not be broken by it. That's what the Ouroboros shows all who look into it: who they are, every despicable and unholy inch. Some...

Maybe I'd always been broken and dark inside.

I sense that he is not an alien persecuted and fleeing, but rather with an open chest, not thinking about anything, not yearning for anything, fully immersed in the peaceful, pure, near present. He is...

Maybe I just worried too much about things. Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance. I don't know any more. I used to know, but I lost the...

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

Received a gift - it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life. Does your husband make you a better person? Edra asked. There I was...

But here is a confession, which I also happily shared with him at our last meeting, which happened as I was completing this book: I had never thought this deeply about my own craft and what makes a...

Makes sense to me. Sometimes starting over is exactly what a person needs. And I think it's admirable. A lot of people don't have the courage it takes to do something like that.

Tessa was convinced that it was a lie, and also that everything she had done in her life, telling herself that it was for the best, had been no more than blind selfishness, generating confusion and...

Do you know, in general, how strong God has made you? How strong and good He has made you?

Truth be told, John said, the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that's sitting inside and shake it clean...

Take it where you can find it, in old photograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.

you?-his words overwhelmed him with a realization of the cowardice which had driven him from her at the very moment of attainment. Yes-he had always feared his fate, and he was too honest to disown...

A stone is heavy and the sand is weighty; but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both.

I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.

I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper...

It is common that on sleepless nights one is theoretically more decisive than during the day, in fact. The next day, upon coldly analyzing this possibility, I concluded that I would never have enough...

Here's another test. Of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?

Everyone is an actor. In the end, everyone wants applause.

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...

There are no simple words. I don't know why I thought I could hide anything behind language.

I don't like to see things done badly on either. At the moment, I am tired of journeys. It is time I arrived somewhere.

What distinguishes normal people is that we share a metaphorical dagger; the concerns of our self - reflection. With this dagger, we cut ourselves and bleed; and the job of our chains of self -...

I sometimes imagine meeting my seventeen-year-old self. She's still here inside me somewhere. Maybe one morning in the mirror, there she'll be. I look at her with affection and understanding and hope....