I know, speaking for myself, no matter what I'm able to do, no matter what book comes out and ends up on paper, I always had something bigger and grander in my head.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.

The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it—just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her.

It isn't a weakness to accept kindness. It isn't a weakness to allow yourself to be cared for.

Don't exercise your freedom of speech until you have exercised your freedom of thought.

It's more important to promote a culture of life. What I mean by that is that I believe what we need to do is not change the law, but change hearts.

Dirt rolls from his palm, Blades of grass Tumble from his hair.

Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope that springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil.

Power is a dangerous thing. Be careful that you don't abuse it or let it make a tyrant of you.

You're never more alive than in battle." "Never more dead after," I say.

If there ever was a time when absolutely nothing existed, all there could possibly be now is nothing.

Some people have said, in so many words, that I'm kind of wooly-headed in believing that the Iranians would see not having nuclear weapons as more in their security interest than not.