I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.

Still anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be.

Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.

Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.

But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God's glory comes to us from His will alone.

Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.

He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.

I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered "Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live.

I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.

But in battle you cannot tell another when it is his time to enter the World-to-Come, nor is it possible to keep any man in this world when he wishes to leave it behind.

Pain was something to get used to, to inure yourself against. I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse.

I was once naïve enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked the town of Eastbourne. He replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it.

That's how writing works, at least for me: even the stuff that doesn't work out gets funneled into the stuff that does work out.

And Barry Levinson is insanely funny. I don't know if you know this, not everyone does, but he and Craig T. Nelson were a comedy team back in the coffeehouse days of the late '60s.

Being an entrepreneur doesn't make you a rich tycoon and being an innovator doesn't mean that you're successful. It just means that you're interesting.

Creative freedom is determined by how we behold the world. Any one of us can make new things with our perceptions that serve as doorways to the creative imagination. No one is excluded.

The secret of karma yoga which is to perform actions without any fruitive desires is taught by Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita.

Someone out there was about to find that their worst nightmare was a maddened Librarian. With a badge.

If you want to be a bridge of hope to the world, you've got to allow yourself to be walked on

Through me the energy policy of the whole Common Market is being held up. Without opening old wounds, it pleases me no end.

Things are only impossible until somebody does what another believes can't be done.