Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of.

This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.

We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.