Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Memory changes as a person matures.

We could give each other a hope, if we communicate with each other in the school, supermarket, bus, train, plane….!

Spiritual growth and creativity are two sides of the same coin.

A fellowship of secret scholars spent five hundred years on this task. Now we're penciling it in for a Friday morning.

My mind is a peaceful poet to itself.

I have to make the very best judgments I can make in terms of what's gonna keep the American people safe. And is what, what's gonna uphold our Constitution and our traditions of due process.

Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effects than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long.

Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning.

How can I tell the signals and the signs By which one heart another heart divines? How can I tell the many thousand ways By which it keeps the secret it betrays?

All knowledge attains its ethical value and its human significance only by the human sense with which it is employed. Only a good man can be a great physician.

Everything we'll accomplish, we'll do it together or not at all.