How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?

To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.

If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter.

The government to you is what God is to agnostics--only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake.

Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.

I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination.

People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection.

Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.

I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility.

Speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being.

It's something you don't see until it's gone-the shapes and things have and the ways in which the people around you mould the shapes.

It doesn't matter who you were or what you've done in the past. The only thing that matters is who you are right now.

Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race.

Wine glasses, like fine wines, have always been a symbol of civilized living.

Dreams never wear you down.

ASAP. Whatever that means. It must mean, 'Act swiftly awesome pacyderm!

Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind

I used to skip breakfast, but eating gets my metabolism going, so I burn more calories all day.

I am as resilient as the steel that was once made here, and I am a fighter, in every sense of the word. We all are.

I just recently became aware of how tenuous my life is. I don't have time for fear.

A leader must not let critics set the agenda.