Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

I surmise that later generations will likely scoff at the means by which we are currently addressing pain as well.

How unfortunate, considering I have decided to loathe him for eternity

Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.

Downstairs, Grandad's warning Barron about something. His voice swells, and I catch the words, "In my day we were feared. Now we're just afraid.

Others proclaim the infirmities of a great man with satisfaction and complacence, if they discover none of the like in themselves.

In developing countries, lack of infrastructure is a far more serious barrier to trade than tariffs.

I am deeply inspired by the courage and achievements of young people who didn't have the safety nets I had growing up.

You can go back and rescind an old regulation like Obama era regulations. That was done once in 20 years. We've done 14 of them in law this year alone, because they can't filibuster that.