Words worth keeping

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Hearts are made to be broken.

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

Faith is taking the first step even when you can't see the whole staircase.

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.

Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.