If somebody honks a horn in Cleveland, they're saying 'Hi.' It's so rare to be honked at in anger. When we have merging traffic, we just interweave. There's real courtesy.

The dachshund is a perfectly engineered dog. It is precisely long enough for a single standard stroke of the back, but you aren't paying for any superfluous leg.

How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?

When it comes down to it, I don't have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is: Read to children. Vote. And never buy anything from a man who's selling fear.

Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between "That doesn't make sense" and "I don't understand.

God save us from idealists! They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won't they commit to get it! I swear, Mirella, I'll settle for a world with good manners.

The sparrow still falls.

If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.

No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace.

Watching him with one eye, she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman.

Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.

I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.

Don’t start. I saw Marcie climb inside your Jeep.”“She needed a ride.”I adopted a hands-on-hips pose. “What kind of ride?”“Not that kind of ride, ” he said slowly.

Which is a greater sin in the eyes of God: to let a child suffer and die to preserve your reputation, or to become friends with your enemy?

If we push on, we begin to feel a vague, tingling sense of who, or what, we really are. It's a powerful feeling, strong enough to have us coming back for more, again and again.

Don't be afraid to try again everyone goes south every now and then.

Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function.

There are occasions when the simplest and fewest words surpass in effect all the wealth of rhetorical amplification.

I'd rather go for Scorsese and De Niro. I just think he was so much better.

You get a role like this in a big action movie [like Jack Reacher] and you can go one of two ways: you can paint in broad strokes, which happens a lot in action films, or you can get very detailed.

Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art .