"The show's writers had peppered the piece with words like "savage," "wild," and "animalistic." What bullshit. Show me the animal that kills for the thrill of watching something die. Why does the stereotype of the animalistic killer persist?

Because humans like it. It neatly explains things for them, moving humans to the top of the evolutionary ladder and putting killers down among mythological man-beast monsters like werewolves.

The truth is, if a werewolf behaved like this psychopath it wouldn't be because he was part animal, but because he was still too human. Only humans kill for sport."
— Kelley Armstrong (Bitten)

"Kids who don't eavesdrop on adult conversations are doomed to a childhood of ignorance. (Men of the Otherworld)"
— Kelley Armstrong (Men of the Otherworld)

"Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy."
— Charlaine Harris

"Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain."
— Ann-Marie MacDonald (Fall On Your Knees)

"There are some stories you can't hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That's one reliable way of understanding time."
— Ann-Marie MacDonald (The Way the Crow Flies: A Novel)

"American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert."
— Pat Conroy

"A story untold could be the one that kills you."
— Pat Conroy

"I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into it's system of laws."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.
- - - Pat Conroy
"
— Pat Conroy

"Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"I don't know. Maybe we're all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we're scared shitless of explosive change. But we're fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium--the devils let loose from their cages."
— Wally Lamb (The Hour I First Believed: A Novel)

"I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. "There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red Smith once commented. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."
— Wally Lamb (Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution)

"Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book."
— Wally Lamb (The Hour I First Believed: A Novel)

"I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy."
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

"So I got my stuff and the girl at the register puts these other things in my bag, too. Little free samples: gum and a comb and a marker pen. So I says to her, 'Look, girlie, I got false teeth and I wear a wig.' So she fishes back in my bag and takes out the comb and the gum. Left the pen in there. Anyways, I went back to the van, even though I knew it was locked. Figured I'd just wait and have a smoke. You can't smoke in the van, see? So while I'm waiting there, minding my own business, this car pulls into the handicapped space right next to us--brand-new car, white and clean, and it's got this bumper sticker on it that says, 'Life Is a Shit Sandwich.' Isn't that stupid? So this guy gets out--good-lookin' fella, in his twenties. I say to him, 'Hey, handsome, tell me something.' He takes a look at my walker and gets all panicky. 'I'm just running in for two seconds,' he says. See, he thinks I'm going to yell at him for parking in a handicapped space, but I ain't. I don't give a rat's ass about that, you see. I'd rather walk the extra ten feet than be called handicapped. Where was I?'
She amazed me. 'Life's a shit sandwich,' I said.
'Oh, yeah. Right. So that guy goes runnin' into the store and here's what I did. I fished that free pen out of the bag and marched right over there to that bumper of his. Got myself right down on the ground--and I wrote--just after the 'Life's a shit sandwich' part--I wrote, 'But only if you're a shithead.' 'Course, then I couldn't get myself back up again--had to yell over to a couple of kids at the phone booth to come pick me back up."
— Wally Lamb

"Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process."
— Sidney Poitier (The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography)

"I am the me I choose to be."
— Sidney Poitier

"Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey."
— Pat Conroy

"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

"Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. 'Pooh?' he whispered.
'Yes, Piglet?'
'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.'"
— A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

"A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you."
— Elbert Hubbard

"Life is an awful, ugly place to not have a best friend."
— Sarah Dessen (Someone Like You)

"A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words."
— Donna Roberts

"I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense."
— Harold S. Kushner

"Write what should not be forgotten."
— Isabel Allende

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"A friend is someone whose face you can see in the dark."
— Frances O'Roark Dowell (The Secret Language of Girls)

"Becoming a child again is what is impossible. That's what you have a legitimate reason to be upset over. Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.
"
— Heather O'Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals: A Novel)

"Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things. As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it."
— Heather O'Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals: A Novel)

""When she said sweet things in my ear, it would slide right down into my heart""
— Heather O'Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals: A Novel)

""You must learn to respect," Papa said.

"But I do not respect her," I said.

Papa paused for a moment, and patted my leg. "Then you must learn to hide your disrespect."
"
— Lawrence Hill (Someone Knows My Name)

"There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.

I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.

They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable."
— Lynda Barry (What It Is)

"We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

"The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Think... of the world you carry within you."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"The only journey is the one within."
— Rainer Maria Rilke