If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

Read at whim! Read at whim!

We can't tell our life from our wish

It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.

I’m a nice person. I give money to starving babies and properly tip my hairdresser. Why am I the one everyone tries to kill?

My boyfriend isn't a rock star. His values are rock solid. We met at a dinner and he made me laugh.

Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.

One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.

The greatest victory is the one over oneself.

I cannot kill him, she muttered to herself. I cannot kill him. I promised Bianka I'd stop at ten bodies a day, and I've already surpassed my quota for the fifth day in a row. I cannot kill him.

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

Do not sleep under a roof. Carry no money or food. Go alone to places frightening to the common brand of men. Become a criminal of purpose. Be put in jail, and extricate yourself by your own wisdom.

You make knowledge relevant to life and you make it important for children to learn things that will really relate to things going on in their lives, and not abstract.

This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries.