She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.

That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there's the business of war.

He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.

...a political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all.

She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.

Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.

NGOs are dangerous. They do what the missionaries used to do in Colonial times. They are Trojan Horses. The worse the situation, the more the NGOs.

in exceptional circumstances — exceptional in that all circumstances in life are exceptional, especially those which are nothing in themselves and come to be everything in their results.

In the dark, words get lost.

I regret to this day that I never went to college. I feel I should have been a doctor.

One of the great virtues of our democratic system is that only one of the candidates gets elected.

He wants worth who dares not praise a foe.

We must do everything we can to help our service members and veterans transition into civilian life once they return home, and that means preparing them for the tough job market.

You journalists bulldoze life's mysteries, ignorant of what you're so ruthlessly turning up.

I smacked her, cracked her, put her in a full nelson.

The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.

The tools I handle are words. They may be unappreciated or misunderstood, but they tell us who we are.