You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

It is the chief joy of all holy beings to witness the joy and happiness of those around them.

Sometimes it can be bad to have too much family. Everybody gets involved in your problems, giving their opinion, gossiping, and making drama. But when bad things happen, they will be there to support you.

I'm not cynical, but the reality is that life is mortal. Terrible, sad things happen. Everybody loses friends and family. I'll be on tour and get really scared if my wife won't answer her phone within one minute. I'm sensitive.

The Stoic makes no differentiation between a small act of kindness by a simple person and a great act of virtue from a learned sage. Virtue is virtue, and in both cases the result is happiness for the one who is virtuous.

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

I would never blame a human creature for feeling lonely.

They meet in church basements and offer bandages to those wounded by the shrapnel of exploding families.

But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.

It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn't how it was going to be for me.

The worst of it was that those people out there-the fear, the suffering the wholesale death-did not really touch him. Crake used to say that Homo sapiens sapiens was not hard-wired to individuate other people in numbers above two hundred, the size of a primal tribe, and Jimmy would reduce that number to two.

I agree with you that Gilead ought to fade away-there is too much wrong in it, too much that is false, and too much that is surely contrary to what God intended-but you must permit me some space to mourn the good that will be lost.