On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.

If you love someone, you don't act like they annoy you. You like them, and you try and make them think they're the most important person in the world to you.

Oh no. I'm not gonna let you leave yet. I'm gonna show you the value of takin' your time to get to work. I probably should have done this a long time ago.

Vicki M. Taylor's "Not Without Anna," is a gripping, hard-hitting, thought-provoking look at the escalating crisis of teen alcohol and drug abuse. Charlene Austin

Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.

And it was the speed that provided some solace. For if it moved like that, it would always move like that, and somehow, because of it, things change, somehow things end.

Around the lunch table everyone seems to have given something up---dairy, meat, gluten, sugar, carbs. Only in a land of plenty could people voluntarily go without so much.

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.

There are things in this world that no human being should be able to endure. We should die of heartbreak, but we do not. Instead, we are forced to survive, to bear witness.

But what Jamie was saying just mixed it all up, selfish and selfless. I wasn't even sure what the words meant anymore. or if it was possible to be one without the other.

while she wanted to look neither to her past nor her future, she lived exclusively in both. They had took different paths, but they had journeyed, so she realized, together.

We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.

I am going to shrink and shrink until I am a dry fall leaf, complete with a translucent spine and brittle veins, blowing away in a stiff wind, up, up, up into a crisp blue sky.

If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?

... one would like to be both [loved and feared], but as it is difficult to combine both love and fear, if one has to choose between them it is far safer to be feared than loved