I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

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.

Every man's endeavor was imbued with responsibility

Abraham, " he said. "I'm pleased to see you alive, old friend.""And I to see you dead.

It's not that "today is the first day of the rest of my life " but that now is all there is of my life.

African American children can't be educationally disadvantaged for 12 years and then experience a miracle cure when it comes time for admission into college.

Among the responsibilities, we will be ending the bleeding of jobs from our country and negotiating fair trade deals for our citizens.

Better to have an open enemy, than hidden friends.

Happiness is this place that, once you arrive there, you have nothing else to do. You get bored. Passion is this up and down; it's like a rollercoaster, you know, and much more interesting to me.

Redeemers always reach the world too late. God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate.

While the best men are guided by love, most mean are still goaded by fear.

I was not developmentally disabled, but didn't mature at the same rate other kids did.