My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.

So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through time, so I accept that.

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

They're not parallel at all. They're my concerns, but how they're expressed particularly on the page is completely divorced from who I am in my street life.

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

But let that not be the moral of my story. True happiness doesn't come from simply getting married. I don't believe a woman's worth should be measured by whether or not she's married.

Oh ... My twitchy witchy girl I think you are so nice, I give you bowls of porridge And I give you bowls of ice-cream.

People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both

A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.... A determinate purpose in life and a steady adhesion to it through all disadvantages are indispensable conditions of success.

Boxing is what pays my bills.

Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths . . . ?

The distance from nothing to a little, is ten thousand times more, than from it to the highest degree in this life.

Tragically, one of the rarest commodities in our culture is empathy. People are hungry for empathy, They don't know how to ask for it.

It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen that is the common right of humanity.

Everything starts with a lie and ends with an apology.