She had treated her life as a room that had to be completely refurnished.

more money will often not solve the problem. In fact, it may compound the problem. Money often makes obvious our tragic human flaws, putting a spotlight on what we don’t know. That is why, all too often, a person who comes into a sudden windfall of cash — let’s say an inheritance, a pay raise, or lottery winnings — soon returns to the same financial mess, if not worse, than the mess they were in before.

Well, if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again.

They said it was the only way to stop her running up debts, but the best way to stop her running up debts was to give her more money.

She was a mess. So what? We are all stinking messes, every last one of us, or we once were messes and found our way out, or we are trying to find our way out of a mess, scratching, reaching.

That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.

At one time an individual could fix everything in his life with his thumb nail or his teeth. ...I believe the ground rules can be transformed so that technology simplifies life instead of continually complicating it.

A woman's life is nine parts mess to one part magic, you'll learn that soon enough...and the parts that look like magic turn out to be the messiest of all.

But I'd felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where the money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it.

The beautiful thing is that anybody has the potential for a massive shift in perspective... even if they're a complete mess.

Manage affairs before they are in a mess.

Life was messy. Always had been and always would be and that was just the way it was, so why bother complaining? You either did something about it or you didn’t, and then you lived with the choice you made.

In Amelia's experience, most people's problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance.

On, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.