Don’t you want to be alive before you die?

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

A real diamond is never perfect.

Angels do not toil, but let their good works grow out of them.

Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed.

I am the product of any imperfection of mine I have never used to make my life better.

They hadn’t been good months. About as ugly as a wet warthog and as messed up as a bumblebee in a snowstorm.

I'm told I'm very charming when people do what I want.

He was making a brave attempt, but Jason could see the sadness lingering in his eyes. Something had happened to him... something to do with Calypso.

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

You might as well sell yourself to slavery at once, as marry man you dislike.

With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears.

In private conversation between intimate friends, the wisest men very often talk like the weakest : for indeed the talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.