Did life treat everyone so wantonly, ripping the good things to pieces while letting bad things fester and grow like fungus

...the face has limited space. My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no more room for crying.

Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder

Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.

Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.

Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

People forget how vulnerable they are despite their shirts and shoes and briefcases, how this hungry and cruel world could strip them, put them in the same position as my beggars.

How starved they seemed for ordinary kindness

The return of solitude was not quite as Dina expected it to be. These many years I made a virtue of inescapable reality, she thought, calling it peace and quiet.

the secret of survival was to balance hope and despair

Where was the line between compassion and foolishness, kindness and weakness? And that was from her position. From theirs, it might be a line between mercy and cruelty, consideration and callousness.

When all else fails, trust God.

I do believe in the sanctity of marriage. ...But I don't see that as conflict with being a tolerant person or an understanding person.

I think society had to grow up to the mentality of Peter Norman.

I've always been a little shy about taking my clothes off, but I don't worry about it any more.

The mantle of leadership for promoting the principles of peace has fallen to America. We didn't ask for it. But it's an honor that we have it.

It is with artillery that war is made.

To grasp and hold a vision, that is the very essence of successful leadership-not only on the movie set where I learned it, but everywhere.

By investing at a discount, Benjamin Graham knew that he was unlikely to experience losses.

There is no life without work, anxieties or tensions. Peace is not found in avoiding these but in understanding them and controlling their force.