"I want to see the king. Wonderful. I'm glad for you. Why are you so glad? Because it's good for every human being to have an unfulfilled wish. It makes all of life so poignant."

"It made me wonder if perhaps our ancestors' crimes were not in fact far more terrible than they claimed. After all, the only histories we possessed told their version of what happened, and in their accounts they were completely innocent."

"I was the last to know what was happening to me. Or at least I was the last to know that I knew."

"She did not send for him until she was afraid; she was not afraid until he undid her work; he did not undo her work until he was past loving her."

"You're the sort of enemy your enemy must love."

"A dreamer, a good man, a kind man who cared less for his plan than for the people in it."

"When he loved his bride it was not a queen he loved, but rather the girl as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood."

"Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was a gross insult."

"Are you the strongest of all men, so strong that you can be merciful to me, a weak woman? Here is the undoing of your strength: I am not a weak woman. I am not a little queen. And your mercy will be your undoing."

"He knew her too well to see her from the distance that pity requires. He loved her because he admired her. For bearing without complaint the burden the queen put on her. For still being gentle and loving when she had ample reason to be bitter."

"A dagger has only a single point, but a traitor cuts from anywhere."

"Justice could be cruel, and crueler yet necessity, but mercy was the cruelest thing of all."

"They never noticed that he was in fact what they only pretended to be."

"To me, the truth is what actually happened. Yet it is impossible to know anything approaching the whole truth about past events. Even the people living them could not possibly understand. That truth is always out of reach."

"Many a man isn't as good as his woman, but I never knew a husband who was better than his wife."

"There's always hope... even when there isn't faith. And sometimes, without hope or faith, there must be charity."

"[He] looked death in the eye and did not seem disappointed."

"You are mine, but you are not mine. I am yours, but you hardly know it."

"I wanted your songs. You wanted my songs more than you wanted my happiness. So you took my happiness, and stole my songs."

"He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more."

"I will love you forever, he thought. I am lying, he thought, and this time he was right."

"She thinks she's kept me. She would have kept me better if she had let me go now."

"Only a fool can't be fooled."

"He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them."

"The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered."

"I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work."

"If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how "important" it is?"

"I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration."

"They are beautiful monsters... And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty."

"In his sleep the voice of the land came to him like whispered lullabies. I did not choose you, said the land. I cannot speak except to those who hear me, and because it is in your nature to hear and listen, I spoke to you and lead you here to save me, save me, save me. Do you know the desert they will make of me? Encased in burning dust or layers of ice, either way I'll be dead. My whole purpose is to thrust life upward out of my soils, and feel the presence of living feet, and hear the songs of birds and the low music of the animals, growling, lowing, chittering, whatever voice they choose. That's what I ask of you, the dance of life, just once to make the man whose mother will teach him to be Quetzalcoatl and save me, save me, save me."

"Gods are like that. It isn't enough for them to run everything. They want to be famous, too."

"I'm accusing you of violating the laws of nature," he said, irritated at my failure to respond. "Nature's virtue is intact," I reassured him. "I just know some different laws."

"I honor my importance and the importance of others. None of us is dispensable, none of us is replacable. In the chorus of life each of us brings a True Note, a perfect pitch that adds to the harmony of the whole. I act creatively and consciously to actively endorse and encourage the expansion of those whose lives I touch. Believing in the goodness of each, I add to the goodness of all. We bless each other even in passing."

"Love is not love if it compelled by reason and driven by logic — love exists in spite of those things, not because of them. It is a emotion which needs no fuel to fire it or oxygen to feed it; if you have to look for the why, then stop looking; it was never there at all."

"The growth of one blesses all. I am committed to grow in love. All that I touch, I leave in love. I move through this world consciously and creatively."

"When I listen to love, I am listening to my true nature. When I express love, I am expressing my true nature. All of us love. All of us do it more and more perfectly. The past has brought us both ashes and diamonds. In the present we find the flowers of what we've planted and the seeds of what we are becoming. I plant the seeds of love in my heart. I plant the seeds of love in the hearts of others."

"Love is the substance of all life. Everything is connected in love, absolutely everything."

"Focused on our good, focused on our abundance we naturally attract more of the same. This is spiritual law. Our consciousness is creative. What we focus on, we empower and enlarge. Good multiplies when focused upon. Negativity multiplies when focused upon. The choice is ours: Which do we want more of?"

"Life is a creative endeavor. It is active, not passive. We are the yeast that leavens our lives into rich, fully baked loaves. When we experience our lives as flat and lackluster, it is our consciousness that is at fault. We hold the inner key that turns our lives from thankless to fruitful. That key is "Blessing.""

"For most of us, the seductive and unstated part of "if I had enough time" is the unstated sentence "to hear myself think." In other words, we imagine that if we had time we would quiet our more shallow selves and listen to a deeper flow of inspiration. Again, this is a myth that lets us off the hook— if I wait for enough time to listen, I don't have to listen now, I don't have to take responsibility for what is trying to bubble up today."

"Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise."

"All too often too often we try to push, pull, outline and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The creative process is a process of surrender, not control."

"Creativity — like human life itself — begins in darkness. We need to acknowledge this. All too often, we think only in terms of light: "And then the lightbulb went on and I got it!" It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding. It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary."

"Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we will just have the courage to admit what it is. And the faith to trust our own admission. The admitting is often very difficult."

"Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite — getting something down."

"What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us."

"The perfectionist is never satisfied. The perfectionist never says, "This is pretty good. I think I’ll just keep going." To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement. The perfectionist call this humility. In reality, it is egotism. It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audition monologue. Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough — that we should try again. No. We should not."

"Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself."

"I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow."