If you don't believe in yourself, and you don't have the fortitude to make that dream happen, why should the hotshots in the publishing world take a chance on you? I don't believe that you need an MFA to be a writer, but I do think you need to take some good workshops.

Sometimes the key to happiness is just expecting a little bit less

There are all sorts of losses people suffer - from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.

Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.

She wanted him to tell her that when you love someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong.

It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying.

Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.