And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.

Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.

And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.