I can remember the times when I started including humor in novels that were suspenseful. I was told you can't do that because you can't keep the audience in suspense if they're laughing. My attitude was, if the character has a sense of humor, then that makes the character more real because that's how we deal with the vicissitudes of life, we deal with it through humor.

Books had shown me, however, that all people everywhere wanted their lives to have purpose and meaning. This longing was universal.

We wasn't born to be all the time scared, we was born happy.

I'm alive but I have no life. I'm alive but also dead. I'm dead and alive.

When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.

Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simmple, sel-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.

We are not born to wait. We are born to do.