"What if I like watching television? What if I don't want to do much else other than read a book?"... "What if I'm tired when I get home? What if I don't fill my days with frenetic activity?" "But one day you might wish you had."

They began to tune up, and suddenly the auditorium was filled with a single sound - the most alive, three-dimensional thing I had ever heard. It made the hairs on my skin stand up, my breath catch in my throat....I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn't just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen...It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them on to my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.

Some mistakes... Just have greater consequences than others. But you don't have to let the result of one mistake be the thing that defines you. You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen.

When you put someone down all the time, eventually they stop listening to the sensible stuff.

I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.

If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.