“Solitude helps you to convert your time into clarity of purpose.”

“Solitude helps you to convert your time into the clarity of purpose.”

“If some mystical clarity of thought came when you looked death in the eye, then I knew Morrie wanted to share it. And I wanted to remember it for as long as I could.”

“Issues or fears of confrontation tend to showcase unhealthy and unprofessional communication. If you are trusting someone to tell you all the good, bad and ugly, but they only give you the good out of their fears and confrontational issues… the bad and the ugly can grow worse and worse quickly.”

“Writing had always helped her, before. It always clarified her feelings and her thoughts, and she never felt like she could understand something fully until the very minute that she’d written about it, as if each story was one she told herself and her readers, at the same time.”

“It’s up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don’t even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we ‘fail’ to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything–obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.”

“…it is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and paradoxical, that we must strive to speak and write clearly.”

“The best answers often come only after we have discovered the correct questions.”

“Each life experience poses this question: how do you want to be changed because of me?”

“But can one actually see beauty with eyes blurred by the lack of almost everything a human being needs?”

“A writer’s goal is to weave the ordinary into fine silk and the truly extraordinary into diaphanous clarity …”

“A lack of clarity could put the brakes on any journey to success.”

“It’s a lack of clarity that creates chaos and frustration. Those emotions are poison to any living goal.”

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)”