“You and I are very strong, and so is your Poppa, but you're not so strong as a brick. When things happen, you will have to feel them. You can't try to avoid that; if it's your nature, go along with it”

“Words got me into trouble. They are the deadliest weapons of all, so that now the gun seems almost innocent by comparison. I fired the shot to stop the words; they were so busy eating everything up. You have no idea how I hate words, how i see them winding out of people's mouths like sticky strands of a web, infinitely elastic, linking the speaker to the listener forever, and finally weaving an impermeable cocoon around the mind and then the poor, fast-beating heart itself.”

“You never know how a story ends until you read the last page”

“Goodness is not its own reward in this world. Those who help are sometimes destroyed first”

“Avoiding life, avoiding making any concrete plans for your life--that's just one way you're pretending you can keep bad things from happening to you again.”

“So stay true to your own nature. If you like to do things in a slow and steady way, don't let others make you feel as if you have to race. If you enjoy depth, don't force yourself to seek breadth. If you prefer single-tasking to multi-tasking, stick to your guns. Being relatively unmoved by rewards gives you the incalculable power to go your own way.”

“If you *stop* putting off homemaking until your hope of marriage develops into a reality, and *start* to develop an interesting home right now, it seems to me two things will happen: first, you will develop into the person you could be as you surround yourself with things that express your own tastes and ideas; and second, as you relax and become interested in areas of creativity, you will develop into a more interesting person to be with.”