I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

To survive, you must tell stories.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.

If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

To be outspoken is easy when you do not wait to speak the complete truth.

Your body's just a vehicle, transporting the soul. It's what's inside of people, is beauty to behold.

The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

The girl in me wanted to slap Lung across his face and yell, "Get your eyes off my sticky buns, ya creep!

Let everyone try and find that as a result of daily prayer he adds something new to his life, something with which nothing can be compared.

Nothing is so dangerous for our security as large groups of desperate people.

I'm still true to my Southern roots.

Mae, he made me go out for a run," Jamie called out. "Tell him I don't run!" "Jamie and I are lilies of the field. We toil not, neither do we jog," Mae informed Nick.