About the time I turned 50, I experienced the profound biological change that often accompanies women at that age. Also, I put two kids in college and lost both of my parents, so I'm no longer somebody's daughter.

When a man has no reason to trust himself, he trusts in luck.

E. W. Howe

Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom.

Friedrich von Schiller

A fate is not a punishment.

Albert Camus

In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

Samuel Johnson

Absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.

Richard Weaver

I would not send a poor girl into the world, ignorant of the snares that beset her path nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself .

Anne Bronte

At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens as all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago.

Stephen King

I still have a photo on my wall of the greatest idol I will ever have in my life, and it's myself at eight. Because that's when the forces of imagination have the same value as the real world, when they're an instrument of survival: when my mother disappeared, and I imagined a mother. That was me at my best.

Henning Mankell

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tendto persist as the new bamboozles rise.)

Carl Sagan

Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and disripute, these are just the worldly winds of existence.

T. Scott McLeod

I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.

John Updike, (on being an old wr

You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense.

Rick Warren