Destiny is simply the relentless logic of each day we live.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.

When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome.

Little by little, the pimps have taken over the world. They don't do anything, they don't make anything - they just stand there and take their cut.

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.

To seek out in a world full of joy the one thing that is certain to give you pain, and hug it to your bosom with all your strength; that's the greatest human happiness.

A man's name, title, and rank are artificial and impermanent; they do nothing to reveal what he really is, even to himself.

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

Suicide is not chosen

Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.

It's all about what you feel on the inside - and I'm feeling like a chocolate chip cookie because I had about ten of them last night!

Wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest.

I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and I won first prize. The first story was published in a newspaper. The second went out on radio.

Euripedes. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.

Each and every event in the past is connected to the present by invisible threads.

Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion. Determined ignorance is the hastiest kind of oblivion.

Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.