In the whole world no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I too am not degraded and murdered.

Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.

It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.

I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.

There's room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory.

Africa, help me to go home, carry me like an aged child in your arms. Undress me and wash me. Strip me of all of these garments, strip me as a man strips off dreams when the dawn comes. . . .

The weakness of most men they do not know how to become a stone or tree.

Reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze.

And let me die suddenly, to be born again in the revelation of beauty....And the revelation of beauty is the wisdom of the ancestors.

Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.

A man screaming is not a dancing bear. Life is not a spectacle.

The dead and not-yet dead, we are company all together.

There's an entire flight simulator hidden in every copy of Microsoft Excel 97.

Don't lose yourself just because you found somebody.

We shouldn't fear a world that is more interacted.

There is what we desire to do, and what we are able to do. When those two things don't coincide, which path should we pursue to find happiness?

My father used to think the word 'legend' was tossed around far too often. I want to say today that in the opinion of his family, my father was a legend.

I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

Mastery is not measured by the number of terrible things you eliminate from your life, but by the number of times you eliminate calling them terrible.

Believing in the project to a certain extent always makes things more affordable.

What joy have I in June's return? My feet are parched-my eyeballs burn, I scent no flowery gust; But faint the flagging zephyr springs, With dry Macadam on its wings, And turns me 'dust to dust.'