“Every life has a measure of sorrow, and sometimes this is what awakens us.”

“You are inexperienced. So was I, once. So is every man. The measure of a person is not how much they have lived. . . It's in how they make us of what life has shown them.”

“Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.”

“Nothing came in reasonable measure, it seemed, not water or sunshine or sorrow. But joy, too, is immoderate sometimes, and that makes up for the rest.”

“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”

“Stories are like genies...They can carry us into and though our sorrows. Sometimes they burn, sometimes they dance, sometimes they weep, sometimes they sing. Like genies, everyone has one. Like genies, sometimes we forget that we do.Our stories can set us free...When we set them free.”