Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

What's happiness for a reader? Be pleasantly surprised by a book from which he expected nothing.

You always become the thing you fight the most.

Your sins are what make you fantastic. It's what makes you alive. You should wear your sins on your sleeve. You should be trying to top your sins on a daily basis.

When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

What matters in a character is not whether one holds this or that opinion: what matters is how proudly one upholds it.

To be satisfied with little is hard, to be satisfied with a lot is impossible.

Don't waste your youth growing up.

When I'm killed, don't think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there's one thing that I know well, I'm damned if I'll be damned to Hell!

Contemporary American children, if they are old enough to grasp the concept of Santa Claus by Thanksgiving, are able to see through it by December 15th.

I could be joking and smiling [with infidels] and then cutting their throats in the next second.