Do you know why they call this place the Rookery?" Elodin asked. I shook my head."Because it's where you go if you're a-ravin'." He smiled a wild smile. He laughed a terrible laugh.

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

Only priests and fools are fearless and I've never been on the best of terms with God.

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.

She taught me I should never do anything in private I did not want talked about in public, and cautioned me not to talk in my sleep.

Metal rusts, music lasts forever.

Fear tends to come from ignorance. Once I knew what the problem was, it was just a problem, nothing to fear.

No hard feelings about that time in the Crucible when you mixed my salts and I was nearly blind for a day. No. No, really, drink up!

He had a bright, reckless tenor that was always wandering off, looking for notes in the wrong places.

X + Y + Z X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.

The fact is he [John F.Kennedy] always had to have somebody around besides Jackie [Kennedy]. Whatever their relationship, he wanted company. I think it gets back to all those years in a hospital bed.

You can't eat fish. It's 6,000 parts DDT per million all over the world, not counting radiation.

What's important is that twice two is four and all the rest's nonsense.

In the existence of our lives, there are many coincidences that bring people together, but there's only one person that will own your heart forever.

Rachel, we've been over this. This is what I do," he said, crumbs of whiten cheese falling from the knife. "Find a way for your lofty, unrealistic ideals to deal with it.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

It's painful to listen to the barking of dogs.

It's hard to always be on top. You go down, you go up.