A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.

Jealousy… is a mental cancer.

Vanity can apply to both insecurity and egotism. So I distance myself, because I feel everything.

Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair.

Generally, the younger the victim, the greater the grief. Yet even when the elderly or infirm have been afforded merciful relief, their loved ones are rarely ready to let go.

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There’s not one part that He doesn’t want to make completely whole.

Life is filled with detours and dead ends, trials and challenges of every kind. Each of us has likely had times when distress, anguish, and despair almost consumed us.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

My faith helps me overcome such negative emotions and find my equilibrium.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

I believe when it comes to love, there’s something intangible about who we are attracted to, and I don’t think I have a pattern.

I’m not an analyzer. I’ve got a son that analyzes everything and everybody. But I don’t analyze people.

It’s impossible to live a life totally free of feelings. God created all of us to be emotional creatures, and feelings are a big part of our lives.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child.

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn’t a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

Sometimes you can’t prioritise family and you feel guilty.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

What air is to the body, to feel understood is to the heart.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

All the songs I write are about human dynamics, whether it’s with girlfriends, boyfriends, or family.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

It’s not possible to stop love.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

The human heart is the same the world over.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

Mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston, I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, ‚Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.‘

The uncertainty of parenting can bring up feelings in us that range from frustration to terror.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

People think, because we’re young, we aren’t complex, but that’s not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

Tears are the silent language of grief.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

William Maxwell’s my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for ‚The New Yorker‘ called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in ‚The New Yorker‘ in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did – about emotions and places.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn’t it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later?

My dad was very intelligent, had a very strong personality. I was amazed with my father.