Please, God, send me something to adore.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.

You have to push through every difficulty to have a breakthrough.

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.

There is something special about unions of husband and wife. Unless we bring men and women together, children will not have mothers and fathers.

Fashions smile has given wit to dullness and grace to deformity, and has brought everything into vogue, by turns, but virtue.

Love lights more fire than hate extinguishes.

Fear is the enemy of logic. There is no more debilitating, crushing, self-defeating, sickening thing in the world--to an individual or to a nation.

God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath.

People who are innately funny are innately disturbed.

At Microsoft, they all rock back and forth like Gates, they wear the same glasses, they have the same hair style. Maybe they grow them in tanks.

I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family.