I love women being the heroes of the piece. There is just something so dramatic and important about this story [The Nightingale ].

People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.

Sight is one of the most easily deceived senses. I could make a coin disappear and your eyes would believe it gone, even if it were merely up my sleeve.

You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.

The answers are what they are. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they aren't true.

The only truth was whatever you could make someone believe.

Trying to justify a world we don't hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it's better just to accept that things are as we see them.

Impatient men are generous ones. Or haven't you learned that by now?

All life's a risk, that's what makes it interesting.

Logic only tells us what's there; it can't really address what isn't. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.

Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.

Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us.

If you create something, whether it's a painting or a company, I think if you care about it, you have some obligation to go out and tell people about it.

We're all just a bunch of sinners, but we do the best we can.

I know I still had to take money from my parents, because no one can afford to live in Manhattan, not even the rich people.

We are all victimized by the natural perversity of inanimate objects...and the assorted human beings who perpetuate and maintain this perversity.

The adventure that the hero is ready for is the one he gets.

There is a tension in relationships between wanting to return to the womb, but also wanting to be free. Because sometimes the woman's attentions can be overly maternal, and you want to go, 'Ahhhh!'

If you aren't nurturing your self, what kind of mother can you be, anyway?

I had my eyes closed in the dark, I sighed a million sighs, I told a million lies, to myself, to myself.