“A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.”

“You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.”

“Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.”

“It can't be dead. It was alive just a minute ago.”

“Sometimeswhen you are trying not to think about somethingit keeps popping back in your headyou can't help ityou think about itand think about itand think about ituntil your brainfeels likea squashed pea.”

“That night I kept thinking about Pandora's box. I wondered why someone would put a good thing as Hope in a box with sickness and kidnapping and murder. It was fortunate that it was there, though. If not, people would have the birds of sadness nesting in their hair all the time, because of nuclear war and the greenhouse effect and bombs and stabbings and lunatics.There must have been another box with all the good things in it, like sunshine and love and trees and all that. Who had the good fortune to open that one, and was there one bad thing down there in the bottom of the good box? Maybe it was Worry. Even when everything seems fine and good, I worry that something will go wrong and change everything.”

“What I have since realized is that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones. ”