1. Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free. 2. There’s no harm in hoping for the best as long as you’re prepared for the worst. 3. Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on. 4. The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them.  Words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.  But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away.  And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it.  That’s the worst, I think.  When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear. 5. If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die. 6. Hearts can break. Yes. Hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t. 7. The world has teeth and it can bite you with them any time it wants. 8. Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage.  The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue. 9. Did they live happily ever after? They did not. No one ever does, in spite of what the stories may say.  They had their good days, as you do, and they had their bad days, and you know about those. They had their victories, as you do, and they had their defeats, and you know about those, too. There were times when they felt ashamed of themselves, knowing they had not done their best, and there were times when they knew they had stood where their God had meant them to stand.  All I’m trying to say is that they lived as well as they could. 10. When all else fails, give up and go to the library.