Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.

I've been trying to garden all my life - it just happens that I haven't had a big garden...until the past few years.

I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.

Everybody is vulnerable through love of their children. Hostages to fortune.

The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.

By the time I went up to Cambridge, I was extremely quiet and well behaved, although I now meet people who remember me as not like that at all.

He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.

Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.

He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it.

And evolution wasn't even properly invented until the late 1800s. Is that enough time to get a Labrador retriever from a dire wolf? I think not.

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is the example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

Because of the gospel, God is doing a new work, and he invites us to participate in this innovative work that affects the entirety of our world.

Perfect retention. I dont think I could do that-Ive never disciplined myself to do it.I suppose a lot of it is a question of discipline. Which improvisation is not.

His avenging angel had come to call him home. A suicide was waiting for him back in his own world, and by now he ought to have learned enough to get through it successfully.

Perhaps one of the most essential exercises in learning to paint is the copying of master works in the museums.

There is nothing softer and weaker than water, and yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things.

History should remember Blair and Bush as the killers of children, or as the lying prime minister and president.

I support the constitutional right of American women to consult their own conscious, their own support of partner, their own minister, but then make their own decision about pregnancy.

I glance at Tris. She grins at me, then leans in to whisper something to Christina. "Are you here to help or what, Stiff?" I say.