I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

I was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.

Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.

I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me.

It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.

Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre," Stead wrote, "but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet's dream, silent as a city of the dead.

Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world

Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.

. . . why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.

I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.

What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?

Not everyone who has killed themselves because they were HIV positive would have been killed by AIDS.

The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.

Go a little easy on the people around you. Try to reel in judging thoughts. Think before you speak.

There is a famous Russian cartoon in which a hippopotamus, in the bush, points out a zebra to another hippopotamus: 'You see,' he says, 'now that’s formalism.

Some people who think they are in unhappy marriages are just in unhappy bodies.

That's my sweetheart in there. Wherever she is, that's where my home is.

The best way to be with your spirit is to forgive.

Among all the diseases of the mind there is not one more epidemical or more pernicious than the love of flattery.

the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.