The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Maxims are texts to which we turn in danger or sorrow, and we often find what seems to have been expressly written for our use.

She regretted nothing she had shared with her lover, nor was she ashamed of the fires that had changed her life; just the opposite, she felt that they had tempered her, made her strong, given her pride in making decisions and paying the consequences for them.

Writing, when all is said and done, is an attempt to understand one's own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence, including insecurities that do not torment normal people, only chronic nonconformists, many of whom end up as writers after having failed in other undertakings.

Exert some independence; you're not a little girl. You can't let anyone else decide things for you. You have to take care of yourself in this world," she said.

For Isaac's protection he had a blue Turkish evil eye and a painted tin hand of Fatima hanging from the bedpost; a candle was always lit on his chest of drawers, next to Hebrew and Christian Bibles and a jar of holy water that one of the domestic staff had brought from the Shrine of Saint Jude.

I related my impressions of La Paz, its purple mountains, its hermetic Indians, and its air, so thin that your lungs are always on the verge of filling with foam and your mind with hallucinations.

It's when you begin to think about going to your dream that your dream is always outside of your comfort zone. It's always beyond what you've ever done.

We want to take ourselves out of our comfort zones; when you're in your comfort zone for so long, you only play to a certain level.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

I am like a little pencil in God's hand. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it.

My life is ... a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me.