Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at bottom comes up."―Epigrams and Interludes, Section 79

This is the day that can change everything for you.

True love waits...

Grace is never wanting. God always gives sufficient grace to whoever is willing to receive it.

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

There have been as great souls unknown to fame as any of the most famous.

But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.

When everything has its proper place in our minds, we are able to stand in equilibrium with the rest of the world.

Who doesn't know that the first law of history is not to dare to say anything false, and the second is not to refrain from saying anything true?

Who's a prince or beggar in the grave?