Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.

...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.

come back, come back to me

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.

A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.

When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).

I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.

Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.

Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing.

For a long time, Maurice rubbed his shaved head in his palm, until at last he looked up at his student. "Teo, I think you have to let Deu be the God he is, not the god you want him to be.

Something potent, something that fused them together, that made her beginning entwine with his end, passed between them. He'd marked her his.And she didn't want to fight it.

I'd rather someone be honest and tell me something that I didn't want to hear, rather than dishonest and tell me something I want to hear.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

Man is a dog's ideal of what God should be.

The war for freedom will never really be won because the price of freedom is constant vigilance over ourselves and over our Government.

Pagford, which by night was no more than a cluster of twinkling lights in a dark hollow far below, was emerging into chilly sunlight.

You learn a lot as a kid, like you don't know anything. I didn't know what was gonna happen if I opened the door. I thought I was gonna be in another world somehow.

Dad sometimes patted me on the knee and called me his Little Schmuck.