Boys mystified me, although I dreamed vaguely of men.

It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.

The heart does not go backward. Only the mind.

When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.

It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.

The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need.

As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.

...History it seemed could be something entirely different a splash of blood whose agony didn't fade overnight or over centuries.

It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.

There is nothing harder, at moments, than talking to someone who has all the power of silence.

...what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?

Preachers love only their own voices.

To change the printout of the body, you must learn to rewrite the software of the mind.

I'm lucky enough that, in my career, people think that attaching my name to something helps it a little bit.

There are certain times you want to be here and there are certain times you want to just go. And when you go, it's usually so exhausting you have to check into a hospital when you come home!

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

The taste of things recovered is the sweetest honey we will ever know.

I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy.

If I had faced it then, I wouldn't be facing it now, but sooner or later you have to choose between running and facing the thing you thought you could not face.

I am single for two reasons. First, I don't date girls who watch Real World because they already think they know me. Second, a lot of girls look at me as the slutty seven.

The parental, and filial affections seem to be as ardent, their sensibility and attachment, as active and faithful, as those observed to be in human nature.