Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

I sat near a window in our little synagogue and looked out at the large church and wondered how a statue whose face was so full of love could be worshipped by someone whose heart was so full of hate.

...I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book....

Your way, your rules. Their way - their rules.

Life could begin all over again if you were lucky enough, and I had decided to be lucky.

I never grew up on Jodeci. I never grew up on things like that 'cause my dad was a preacher, and he kind of kept us away from music like that.

I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world.

Software engineering is the establishment and use of sound engineering principles to obtain economically software that is reliable and works on real machines efficiently.

Leanness of body and soul may go together.

We are eternal. All this pain is an illusion.

Martin O'Neill, standing, hands on hips, stroking his chin.