It was only a phrase that went from mouth to mouth and was never quite swallowed.

If an animal has to be sacrificed when a new bridge is built, what will it take to build a whole new world?

The days were heavy and sticky. All identical, one the same as the other. Soon they would even get rid of their one remaining distinction, the shell of their names: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

And everything would be different, different.

The writer is always to some extent in exile, wherever he is, because he is somehow outside, separated from others; there is always a distance.

A mountaineer’s house, before being his home and the home of his family, is the home of God and of guests.

Shiny musical instruments wailed, their mouths open like lilies.

Winter hurled more wind and rain at the city than it ever had before. Clouds dashed about in all directions emptying their thunder, hail and rain. The horizon was choked in fog.

Can a country's people be better than its planes?

Can one move an empire as if it were a house?

All the couples therapy and communication seminars in the world won't save you if you aren't prepared to close your eyes and hug the mainmast through a storm.

...success is not a comparison of what we have done with what others have done.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

America is a remarkable place in that social attitudes change almost imperceptibly, and then you wake up the next day and they've changed. But they've been changing all the time.

I'm a Libra, I always have two sides of everything.

Life, not death, is the great mystery you must confront.

There is no misery in art. All art is about saying yes, and all art is about its own making.

It is curious and interesting to notice what an attraction a fussy, mincing, nickel-plated word has for you.

Clothes are like a good meal, a good movie, great pieces of music.

I never knew motherhood could be so truly gratifying until I had Natasha.