“A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.”

“I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.”

“A weak but steady throb lay beneath Kev’s searching fingertips. Win’s heartbeat…the pulse that sustained his universe.”

“Saving YouThe darkness takes him over, the sickness pulls him in; his eyes—a blown out candle, I wish to go with him.Sometimes I see a flicker— a light that shone from them; I hold him to me tightly, before he’s gone again.”

“Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”

“Depression is a serious illness. It’s physically painful, debilitating. And you can’t just decide to get over it in the same way you can’t just decide to get over cancer. Sadness is a normal human condition, no different from happiness. You wouldn’t think of happiness as an illness. Sadness and happiness need each other. To exist, each relies on the other.”

“At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.”

“The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one. But it will only grow in the mud. In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud — the obstacles of life and its suffering. … The mud speaks of the common ground that humans share, no matter what our stations in life. … Whether we have it all or we have nothing, we are all faced with the same obstacles: sadness, loss, illness, dying and death. If we are to strive as human beings to gain more wisdom, more kindness and more compassion, we must have the intention to grow as a lotus and open each petal one by one. ”

“What is cancer, he thought to himself, if not a terrorist attack from above? What is it that God is doing, if not terrorizing us in protest against…something. Something so lofty and transcendental that it is beyond our grasp?”

“victimnoun ˈvik-təm 1. The moment you tell everyone you have a mental disorder, in order to excuse your behavior.”

“I am not afraid to die; I am only afraid of saying goodbye to you forever.”

“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.”

“God is not here to be demanded of, begged from, or criticized. He hands out burdens to those who are strong enough to carry them, and I feel profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of lining up with the other invalids and asking for mine to be alleviated.”

“I love to walk. Walking is a spiritual journey and a reflection of living. Each of us must determine which path to take and how far to walk; we must find our own way, what is right for one may not be for another. There is no single right way to deal with late stage cancer, to live life or approach death, or to walk an old mission trail.”