Dorothy Gilman quotes:

There are no happy endings there are only happy people.

If something anticipated arrives too late it finds us numb, wrung out from waiting, and we feel - nothing at all. The best things arrive on time.

People need dreams, there's as much nourishment in 'em as food.

Hell is more like boredom, or not having enough to do, and too much time to contemplate one's deficiencies.

Brainwashing, thought Mrs. Pollifax contemptuously, and suddenly realized that she was not afraid. She had endured other crises without losing her dignity--births, widowhood, illnesses--and she was experienced enough to know now that everything worthwhile took time and loneliness, perhaps even one's death as well.

A man from hell is not afraid of hot ashes.

my rebelliousness went so deep that, faced with a can of asparagus that instructed me to open at this end, I always, stubbornly, opened it at the other.

It's when we're given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves.

when a gourd is hollowed out it becomes empty and is of great use to the world because of its emptiness.

We overlook how much in our lives is invisible; love, for instance; thought, God, the future, time, faith, hope and even the electricity that brings us light.

People need dreams, there's as much nourishment in them as food.

The best things arrive on time.

I wasn't offering her pity," Mrs. Caswell said impatiently. "Tragedies don't interest me, tragedies and heartbreaks are all alike, what matters is how a person meets them, how they survive them. Given the inevitability of losses and disappointments in life, that's where the challenge is and the uniqueness. I was offering her sympathy.

will anything but fanaticism make for change? Wisdom and compromise come later.

When we live with a memory we live with a corpse; the impact of the experience has changed us once but can never change us again.

... both therapy and friendship possessed the common denominator of discovering a self ...

... people misunderstood death, they died not of too little life but of too much life, that as the skin withered and the future grew short it was the past that took on flesh, until ultimately the sheer accumulation of experience and memory became too heavy to carry.

Everything matters terribly to children, you know, they're fresh and unformed ...

It's compassion that makes gods of us.

Perhaps we clutch at life only when we have never lived or trusted it. Then death seems the last and greatest defeat, the end of something never felt.

Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know.

What continues to astonish me about a garden is that you can walk past it in a hurry, see something wrong, stop to set it right, and emerge an hour or two later breathless, contented, and wondering what on earth happened.

... old clothes, old friends, old books. One needs constants in a traveling life.