But the truth is that I'm gloomy - gloomier than I ever was during the war. Everything is so broken, Sophie: the roads, the buildings, the people. Especially the people.

I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.

I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.

Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.

Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.

Then I imagined a lifetime of having to cry to get him to be kind, and I went back to no again.

Do you arrange your books alphabetically? (I hope not.)

‎What a blight that woman is. Do you happen to know why? I lean toward a malignant fairy at her christening.

I did not throw 'The Shepherd Boy Sings in the Valley of Humiliation' at the audience. I threw it at the elocution mistress. I meant to cast it at her feet, but I missed.

What is inherent inside you is your uniqueness and peculiarity

I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It's my spirit, my soul, if you will. There is only a blank there now - medals where my soul used to be.

Piano Man put up a fight but his resistance was futile. Hell hath no fury like a drunken girl at her bachelorette party in the mood to sing.

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.

Mind is the king of the senses; breath is the king of the mind; and the nerves are king of the breath.

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

It's hard to make out the difference between insults and bad advice.

Leadership requires followership and following is an act of trust, faith in the course of the leader, and that faith can be generated only if leaders act with integrity.

I've grown up knowing that you put as much of your private life out there as you feel comfortable with.

I don't think you need to be so result-oriented when you're trying to define the success of an art work. I think we can allow some unpredictability.