Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price.

Lucien?”“Yes, Alice?”Her heart was pounding, but she willed herself to muster the courage to reach out to him— unpredictable, dangerous as he was. “I think it’s real.

Everything in our life is an illusion.

Being Jem, Tessa reflected, must be a great deal like being the owner of a thouroughbred dog that liked to bite your guests. You had to have a hand on his collar constantly.

Lee's great gifts are teaching and inspirational guidance, not administration and management.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.

The cat is nature's masterpiece.

Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction.

United need to start garnishing some points.

I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.