Great Throughts Treasury

"Love and magic have a great deal in common. They enrich the soul, delight the heart. And they both take practice."

"Life is like a moustache. It can be wonderful or terrible. But it always tickles."

"Good fiction creates its own reality."

"If you don't go after what you want, you'll never have it. If you don't ask, the answer is always no. If you don't step forward, you're always in the same place."

"Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live."

"Some things in life are out of your control. You can make it a party or a tragedy."

"Broken hearts healed. Maybe the cracks were always there, like thin scars, but they healed. People lived and worked, laughed and ate, walked and talked with those cracks. For many, even the scars healed and they loved again."

"When we grow up, we lose the talent for loving without restrictions."

"Knowledge is a great gift, and the thirst to seek it even greater. Use what you know... Head and heart... You are not made to give greater weight to one than the other."

"She surrounded herself with books at work and at home. Her living space was a testament to her first and abiding love with shelves jammed with books tables crowded with them. She saw them not only as knowledge entertainment comfort even sanity but as a kind of artful decoration."

"You can't edit a blank page."

"Be yourself. Be true to that, to your heart. Patience. See what happens if you step back instead of bounding forward."

"Excuse me? Tonight you represent every dateless woman in this city, every woman who's about to sit down to a lonely meal of Weight Watchers past primavera she's just nuked in the microwave. Every woman who will get into bed tonight with a book or reruns of Sex and the City as her only companion. You are our shining hope....But no pressure."

"We make destiny with every turn, every choice."

"People and relationships never stop being a work in progress."

"Love is not enough. But, it is the rock on which all else stands."

"I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page."

"I don't want to be expected to fall in passively someone else's plans for me. That's what I don't want. I don't want it assumed that I simply don't have any personal goals or wishes of my own. Or any basic competence of my own. That's what I don't want! "

"Memories are nice little possessions. As long as you don't ignore the present when you take them out to play."

"The very young and the very old often saw what others could not. Or would not."

"It doesn't matter, that's the point. It doesn't matter that things don't always work exactly the way you thought they should. Moments matter. People matter, how they feel, how they connect. Who they are alone and together. All that matters, no matter how quickly the moment passes. Maybe because it passes."

"Survivors lived with their mistakes."

"I think those who have impact and influence over us are often unaware."

"Potholes and bumps? Welcome to the world. Every road has them. They're there to be navigated, avoided, driven over, or through to the other side. Don't keep driving into the pothole."