Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect.

Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.

When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films.

The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.

Don't be alarmed, the god I am trying to kill is the one I hate, not the one I love

I'm trying to strip myself down to my barest essentials so I can figure out where I begin and where the woman the world told me to be begins. I'm going back to the starting line.

The hugest changes were the ones that could not be seen – that’s where the real apocalypse lay: in people’s hearts, their souls, their beings.

Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.

Today right here in America we have 50 million people without health insurance.

It was one of those moments when you feel the future so much that it humbles the present.

There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.

Evolution is a laughing matter for anybody that's got a rational mind.

Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.