If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.