My books are inert as cordwood till a readers imagination ignites one and an old flame jumps to life.

The bad thing about falling into pieces is that it hurts. The good thing about it is that once you're lying there in shards you've got nothing left to protect, and so have no reason not to be honest

But I finally concluded that it is an inalienable right of lovers everywhere to become temporarily worthless to the world, it may even be their duty.

We hear nothing so clearly as what comes out of silence.

And into the brown paper bag of my heart, Eddy slipped a smile.

To me, it's a great day every time I receive a letter from somebody who climbed inside one of my books, inhabited it for a while, learned a little something, and emerged grateful.

I started having doubts right on top of my certainty.

Music is just a word for something we love largely because it consists of things that words can't express. Likewise, the heart is just a word for something in us that music sometimes touches.

... the best way to strip the allure and dreaminess from a lifelong dream is, very often, simply to have it come true.

Ecosystems are holy. The word "environmental" is a deadly compromise itself. It's a policy word that lives only in the head, and barely there.

But churches always have been the leading cause of the need for churches.

Kadafi is a zombie in a pillbox hat, that's what he is!

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes. It takes more gut and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

A detective sees death in all the various forms at least five times a week.

Don't talk too much or too soon.

endless hope, endless disappointment.

I can't remember anything without a sadness so deep that it hardly becomes known to me, so deep that its tears leave me a spectator of my own stupidity.

It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.

A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

I have had no professional training.