Stay strong! Your test will become your test-imony, your mess will become your mess-age.

Know that you are the perfect age. Each year is special and precious, for you shall only live it once. Be comfortable with growing older.

She mourns for the future, as the past has taught her. And yet there is a rejoicing in her, persistent and unbidden as the beating of her heart.

She was going about her life, taking her pleasures as she found them, suffering what was hers to suffer, doing what she had to do. She had about her no air of self-pity or complaint. And this could only have been because, in her own heart, she was not pitying herself or complaining.

Their failure was something you felt rather than saw.

It was as though I knew without exactly knowing, or felt, or smelled in the air, the already accomplished fact that nothing would ever be simple for me again. I never again would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away.

But there, in her diminishment, she seemed to resemble only herself, as if suffering finally had singled her out.

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

Life wasn't made to be easy on folks: they wouldn't ever have any reason to be good and die.

I love, I will accept no substitute; ...; if happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

There are good men everywhere, at all times. Most men are. Some are just unlucky, because most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be. And I've known some that even the circumstances couldn't stop. ~from 'Delta Autumn

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.