"Here is where it -- you are alone in your head, you are all alone inside your brain. and that makes it impossible to believe that anything, everything and anyone that you own, love or hateis real. we will never know if we are living or dreaming."

"Here is an amazement –– once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same."

"What countries, what visitations, what pomp would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?"

"Am I not among the early risers and the long-distance walkers? Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider the perfection of the morning star above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees blue in the first light? Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though sheets of water flowed over them though it is only wind, that common thing, free to everyone, and everything?"

"Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?"

"I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything — other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion — that standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."

"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

"Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world."

"And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful — how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar."

"To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

"she always carries a notebook. That’s one of her trademarks. And she said to me, “If you don’t have a notebook, you don’t get it again. You have to write things down as they come to you.”"

"Drugs provide pleasure; they cannot provide happiness. For happiness, you need people."

"The most destructive habit [to relationships] is criticizing; next comes blaming, but any of the habits are more than capable of disconnecting you from a person you want to be close with."

"The Seven Deadly Habits of External Control: Blaming, Criticizing, Complaining, Nagging, Threatening, Punishing, and Bribing (Rewarding to Control)."

"Your teen may be weaker, but he is not without the ability to do himself and others a lot of harm by showing you that you can't control him at school or anywhere else when he is out of your sight....[W]hen he is on his own, your only control over him is the strength of your relationship."

"What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now: improve an important, present relationship."

"If you depend on the widespread lover's delusion, 'With my love he or she will change,' you have little chance to help yourself. This delusion is external control to the maximum. If things are not good from the beginning, they are very likely to change, but not for the better."

"We would be much better off getting rid of the psychology that is causing so much misery than looking for chemicals that make us feel better but do nothing to solve our loneliness."

"Such people who choose to depress are not mentally ill; their brain chemistry is not abnormal. It is changed from what it is when they are happy, but that change is perfectly normal for the total behavior, depressing, they are choosing....The brain chemistry no more causes his depressing than sweating causes running. It is the choice to depress or to run that results in both."

"To be depressed or neurotic is passive. It happened to us; we are its victim, and we have no control over it. This use of nouns and adjectives makes it logical for us to believe that we can do nothing for ourselves...but you are capable of choosing something better. If it is a choice, it follows that you are responsible for making it. With verbs, you are not a victim of mental illness; you are either the beneficiary of your own good choices or the victim of your own bad choices. You are not ill in the usual sense of having the flu or food poisoning. A choice theory world is a tough responsible world; you cannot use grammar to escape responsibility for what you are doing."

"When we depress, we believe we are the victims of a feeling over which we have no control."

"When a client says, It's hard to say, he usually knows what's really going on but doesn't want to talk about it....I break through that reluctance by acting as if it wasn't there. 'Well, say it anyway. This is the place to say hard-to-say-things."

"[Reality Therapy] is based on choice theory and focuses on improving present relationships, almost always disregards past relationships, and depends for its success on creating a good relationship between the client and the counselor."

"Beware of getting involved with people who seem to be able to feel good but have no close friends. They may be witty and fun to be around, but their humor is all put-downs and hostility. If you marry such a person, you will soon be the recipient of that hostile humor and may regret it for the rest of your marriage....Someone who does not have good friends does not know how to love."

"We almost always have choices, and the better the choice, the more we will be in control of our lives."

"Brain drugs may make us feel better, but they do not solve the problems that led us to feel miserable"

"The Kindle is the most successful electronic book-reading tablet so far, but that’s not saying much; Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of e-book reader projects."

"You're witnessing the birth of a third major computer platform: Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone."

"People won’t start dumping Google en masse; Google is a habit."

"For the last 15 years, Microsoft’s master business plan seems to have been, "Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it.""

"Five billion dollars a year spent on ringtones? What the?"

"Incredibly, Apple has persuaded Disney, which owns ABC, to make available all episodes of five TV series, including "Lost," "Desperate Housewives" and "That's So Raven." Each show costs $1.99 — an easy impulse buy if you missed an episode. They play back beautifully, with no network logo in the corner, no yearlong wait for the DVD, and no commercials. (One 43-minute "hour" of TV takes 12 minutes to download with my cable modem, and about two minutes to transfer to the iPod over its U.S.B. 2.0 cable.) ...That Mr. Jobs persuaded Disney to dip its pinky toe into these waters is an impressive development — and a very promising sign."

"Microsoft, as you may have noticed, hasn't exactly been hitting home runs lately. Only a fraction of the population upgraded to Windows 95; much of corporate America, having finally got the kinks out of Windows 3.1, has no intention of budging. Suppose, then, that the air gradually begins leaking out of Microsoft's tires. Subsequent Windows versions become absolute monstrosities, laughable bloatware that requires 128MB of RAM."

"The Kindle is just the razor. The books are the blades — ka-ching!"

"An international team of psychiatrists has flown to Redmond, WA in an attempt to discover exactly what makes Bill Gates tick. And, more especially, what makes him go cuckoo every half hour."

"… as the world rapidly becomes a civilization of machines, the masters of machines will increasingly be the ones in control of the world."

"I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty."

"I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

"I took responsibility early and, like my parents, I was serious."

"I was born into it [wealth] and there was nothing I could do about it. It was there, like air or food or any other element. The only question with wealth is what to do with it. It can be used for evil purposes or it can be an instrumentality for constructive social living."

"My mother and father raised but one question: Is it right, is it duty?"

"The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God."

"I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might."

"I believe in all-wise-and all-loving God, named by whatever name, and that the individuals highest fulfillment, greatest happiness, and widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with His will."