No one makes history, no one sees it happen, no one sees the grass grow.

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.

Love is the only thing we can carry with us when we go and it makes the end so easy.

There's something about all the people who are on a mission for purity and chastity, which I find very questionable.

I would have my secretary of treasury be in touch with the financial centers, not only here but at home.

You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

My work from the last 25 years has been asking people to see differently.

Do you feel like he ignores you?" "No. I feel like he doesn't see me.

Who you gonna believe-me or your lying eyes?

I have strong feelings for you, I just haven't decided if their positive or negitive yet.A

I have always... expected a lot from myself.