“It just came out. A laugh. It was a laugh that came straight from my belly. I could not stop it. It came out and kept coming. I was worried that I would wake Gaston, but he did not move. I was in bed, in my pajamas, exhausted, in despair, unsure of where my baby was, and I could not stop laughing.” ”

“My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.”

“So in our own poor hides and from our miserable comrades we learn the nature of satiety. Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.”

“The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”

“You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.”

“There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.”

“Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?”

“True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.”