I learned a long time ago we've control of little in this world, Amanda. It doesn't belong to us. It's out of our hands. Like being born or being sold into prostitution at eight. All we can change is the way we think and the way we live.

I see sunrise as God's good morning, and sunset as God's good night.

She only had this moment, and she must fulfill it worthily. Of what use was it to allow herself regret and grief, to ponder endlessly what she might have done differently?

In spring, Granny would send me off to pick bluets, violets, and windflowers. As the weeks passed, she'd ask for yellow lady's slippers and bleeding hearts, then roses and white rhododendron clusters that grew along the stream. She'd always seem to know the day when the mayflies danced and died. When I'd come back from whatever venture she'd sent me on, she'd talk about how life was precious.

During the ice storms and long bleak nights of winter, she'd tell me the mountains were like sleeping giants that'd come awake again soon. "God'll see to it." And God did. Those mountains always did wake up, without fail. Year after year, the earth came back to life again with what Granny called "God-green".

The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.

Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.

Life produces a different taste each time you take it.

This is the fallacy of power: ultimately, it is effective only in an absolute, a limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power.

The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.' And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning, 'That path leads ever down into stagnation.

The only permanence was fluid. Change was all that mattered.

There's no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.