What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred.

Home is the first refuge from - and last defense against - the disappointments and the terrors of life.

We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what lies in our hearts.

Loss is the hardest thing, I said. But it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore.

If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, 'Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you -- are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap

At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.

It may sound strange, but when you're a kid and you're in that environment, for some reason for a long time you think, when the doors are closed in other houses, this is what it's like everywhere. And then at some point you begin to realize that isn't true, and books were really the educational system that showed me that there were many better and different ways to live a life.