“Clever is when one is crafty enough to mistake your imagination for intelligence. Smart is when one assumes they are too educated to notice the difference.”

“Once the sun comes up, all you have to do is do your part”

“you don't have to worry about burning bridges, if you're building your own”

“You can't go from 1-10 without going through 2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9. Learning to respect the process and living to appreciate the result is the formula for growth”

“You know you're a writer when you wish you could meet your characters and hang out with them.”

“Pat, if there's anything you recall about your first visit with Monsignor Frank Kief, I sincerely hope it's this: there is no such thing as being too busy to read. The fine irony is, the answers to the questions we're so busy wrestling with, they're pressed between the pages. Waiting. One need only pause. You'll find books reinforce what you already know, and confirm what you've always suspected. What I mean is our instincts our right, mostly. Sometimes we just need a gentle reminder from an outside source. That's the power of reading others' words. It's reassurance that even from great distances, we human beings do come to the same conclusions. To know we're not all so different after all, that is the shared humanity found in the cousel of good books.”

“In perhaps the most revealing of all the health-related studies, a group of subjects who had contracted malignant melanoma received traditional treatment and then were divided into two groups. One group met weekly for only six weeks; the other did not. Facilitators taught the first group of recovering patients specific communication skills. (When it's your life that's at stake, could anything be more crucial?) After meeting only six times and then dispersing for five years, the subjects who learned how to express themselves effectively had a higher survival rate--only 9 percent succumbed as opposed to almost 30 percent in the untrained group.”