Pain was something to get used to, to inure yourself against. I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse.

Still anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be.

I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.

Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.

Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.

But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God's glory comes to us from His will alone.

Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.

He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.

I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered "Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live.

I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.

But in battle you cannot tell another when it is his time to enter the World-to-Come, nor is it possible to keep any man in this world when he wishes to leave it behind.

Cruel people are not only people who kill innocent people with guns. Individuals who steal from government coffers to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor are grossly cruel.

The world is a merrier place to live if people do things more out of sincerity, not just out of formality.

I don't want to be a great actress. I want to be a sexy movie star.

I would have played street cop number three if it meant getting to work with Chris Nolan.

After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.

My statements are just a statement of fact.

Nobody told me when I became a Democrat that that involved opposition to lower taxes.

We are only the temporary custodians of the particles which we are made of. They will go on to lead a future existence in the enormous universe that made them

Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.