A child's hand in yours - what tenderness and power it arouses. You are instantly the very touchstone of wisdom and strength.

My God would never deliberately bring harm to anyone. But if it happens, if it simply happens due to wind and rain and weather and man's own mistakes, then God has promises to keep: Li£e continuing. An even richer, fuller, brighter ongoing life to compensate.

Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realize you're not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully.

When you write from the heart, you not only light the dark path of your readers, you light your own way as well.

Thank you, God, for the dignity and beauty of self. The precious innate self. The only thing that can't be taken from us. The only thing we really own.

One day you're racing about the business of life, harried but vital, a part of its machinery. Then gradually but inexorably you are left out, until one day you find the machinery tearing along without you - and nobody even notices.

Let me remember that each life must follow its own course, and that what happens to other people has absolutely nothing to do with what happens to me.