When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That's a beautiful deleveraging.

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!

People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

Your mind simply can't focus forward and downward all at the same time.