Some people say the Balkans is just inherently violent. That we have to fight a war every fifty years.""I hope that's not true", I said.

Telling my story was supposed to be a good thing but it had just made everything worse.

I was so tired of his being even-keeled in the face of all that was upsetting and ugly and illogical.

The realization that my parents, too, felt pain and fear frightened me more than any strangers could.

Music, I'd heard him say, was like dessert. He could live without it, but life just wasn't as good.

I'd studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly

...I knew in the end the guilt of one side did not prove the innocence of the other.

God wants to advise us and stretch out His Almighty hand of help towards us

The wolf Lupa had told him that mortal minds could believe just about anything—except the truth.

You can be inspired by others, but when you're inspired from within then you have real power for change.

... there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft.

Ninety-eight per cent of laughter is nothing to do with jokes, which do not deserve to bear the weight of all the funny stuff in the world.

I like double entendre because then the people who get it enjoy it, and the people who don't get it don't know about it.

Dangerous he who thinks it safe to die!

What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.

The supreme task of the Church is the evangelization of the world.

My idea of a meal, if I was hungry, was to open a bag of potato chips.