In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.

Guilt and fear are a kind of rot. It spreads unless it's cleaned. And there's only one way to do that.

Honest listening is one of the best medicines we can offer the dying and the bereaved.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.

Learning how to fly, for me, was so euphoric.

As an actor, you get humbled all the time. Everyone is a critic.

If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter?

I don't want no better book than what your face is.

A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.

I should have suspected my husband was lazy. On our wedding day, his mother told me: "I'm not losing a son; I'm gaining a couch."