Perhaps we should keep our monsters about us, lest we become them ourselves.

The heart of a father is the masterpiece of nature.

I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.

The world believes it was built by love but reading Shah Jahan's own words on the Taj, one could say it was grief that built the Taj Mahal and it was sorrow that saw it through sixteen years till completion.

What is a friend? I will tell you . . . . it is someone with whom you dare to be yourself.

He'd always had a quickening of the heart when he crossed into Arizona and beheld the cactus country. This was as the desert should be, this was the desert of the picture books, with the land unrolled to the farthest distant horizon hills, with saguaro standing sentinel in their strange chessboard pattern, towering supinely above the fans of ocotillo and brushy mesquite.

Do not spit into the well, you'll get drunk