He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.

Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?

Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.

Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.

Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.

Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.

But men are such strange creatures, really. I think most of them would rather we weren’t around at all, so they could just spend time mooning over each other. Hero worship and all that stuff.

The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.

It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.

All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.

I have learned that the first step to letting go is to accept the facts.

Don't steamroll your way into a conversation before establishing any relational credibility.

No one of us can survive in the world of today, much less what it will become, without personal inspiration.

A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent.

I've done a lot of pilots. A lot of shows. You're young and you do a job just because you know someone gave you a job.

Struggle is part of the journey.

The future is an empty canvas or a blank sheet of paper, and if you have the courage of your own thought and your own observation you can make of it what you will

I can foresee no circumstance in which I would allow my name to be put forward for the leadership of the Conservative Party.

I thought, I'm going to die. And, thinking that, I was determined to live.

Reprove your friend privately, commend him publicly.