My mother once told me she thought hell would be nothing more than being given a glimpse of God--then having it taken away, forever.

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

Life's generally artless ... but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you're in the final act of a lousy movie.

Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.

That's what happens when you keep a secret from someone you love: you start to hate them for allowing you to prove your own willingness to deceive them.

Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.

When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.

Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.

There is no God and that's His only commandment.

With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world.

You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.

All the blessings we enjoy are Divine deposits, committed to our trust on this condition, that they should be dispensed for the benefit of our neighbors.

And lo I am with you always, even to the very end of the age.

Good players want to be coached. Great players want to be told the truth.

The thing about past love is that they exist, only in your fantasy as a fantasy.

We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.

The temporary good is enemy to the permanent best.

It doesn't matter what you can do if you don't know why you're doing it.

If I'd known it was harmless, I'd have killed it myself!

Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world.

I was born in and worked in a period that could be called enviable.