"Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action."

"Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking."

"... you don't have to wait for someone to treat you bad repeatedly. All it takes is once, and if they get away with it that once, if they know they can treat you like that, then it sets the pattern for the future."

"I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform."

"Life is not a straight line leading from one blessing to the next and then finally to heaven. Life is a winding and troubled road. Switchback after switchback. And the point of biblical stories like Joseph and Job and Esther and Ruth is to help us feel in our bones (not just know in our heads) that God is for us in all these strange turns. God is not just showing up after the trouble and cleaning it up. He is plotting the course and managing the troubles with far-reaching purposes for our good and for the glory of Jesus Christ."

"No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found."

"Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, its our own expectations that crush us."

"Life is half delicious yogurt, half crap, and your job is to keep the plastic spoon in the yogurt."

"Scars show us where we have been, they do not dictate where we are going."

"I tried to contain myself... but I escaped!"

"There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them"

"The ability to discipline yourself to delay gratification in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the long term, is the indispensable prerequisite for success."

"Life sucks, and then you die.Yeah, I should be so lucky."

"Never give up on anybody. Miracles happen everyday."

"Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?"

"Why not just live in the moment, especially if it has a good beat?"

"What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul."

"Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?"

"And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something."

"Many people pray to be kept out of unexpected problems. Some people pray to be able to confront and overcome them."

"Life is ours to be spent, not tobe saved."

"See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded."