Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.
The natural state of motherhood is unselfishness. When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your children.
It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.
Advice is like snow - the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind.
European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.
When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.
It's sad that the BBC is toning down Dennis the Menace for a cartoon series. He is losing his weapons, catapult and peashooter, will no longer pick on Walter the Softy, and his ferocious grimace is to be replaced by a charming, boyish smile.
I didn't really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment.
When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves.
Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.