My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

The minute you become conscious that you are doing good, that's the minute you have to stop because from then on it's wrong.

To be human is to be in a story.

Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.

The language of labels is like paper money, issued irresponsibly, with nothing of intrinsic value behind it, that is, with no effort of the intelligence to see, to really apprehend.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.

I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.

Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.

To shatter even the largest stones on earth, it takes only a small quantity of explosive powder.

I never thought about doing men. Never.

one of the advantages of cycling is that it automatically prevents a journey from becoming an Expedition.

There's no point in getting frustrated at yourself. Just be truthful.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

What destiny sends, bear! Whoever perseveres will be crowned.

In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.

When you are in a long relationship, sometimes you forget who you are, what you love to do.

We need not borrow and take up sorrows upon use of the morrow, to make up our present load; as we read of daily bread, so of a daily cross, Luke ix. M, which we are bid to take, not to make.

Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength.