The saints differ from us in their exuberance, the excess of our human talents. Moderation is not their secret. It is in the wildness of their dreams, the desperate vitality of their ambitions, that they stand apart from ordinary people of good will.

It is the leisured, I have noticed, who rebel the most at an interruption of routine.

Children from ten to twenty don't want to be understood. Their whole ambition is to feel strange and alien and misinterpreted so that they can live austerely in some stone tower of adolescence, their privacies unviolated.

Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!

A mother's hardest to forgive. Life is the fruit she longs to hand you Ripe on a plate. And while you live, Relentlessly she understands you.

Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.

The knowingness of little girls, is hidden underneath their curls.