Speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being.

To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.

If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter.

How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?

The government to you is what God is to agnostics--only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake.

Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.

I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination.

People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection.

Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.

I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility.

It's something you don't see until it's gone-the shapes and things have and the ways in which the people around you mould the shapes.

He really was beautiful. I know boys aren't supposed to be. But he was.

I am taking belly dancing now. My hips are double-jointed, so I can do it really easily.

There is nothing personal in the thunderclap of understanding. The lightning that releases it comes from outside oneself.

I am an aggressive style boxer and I will be in there to mix it up, but it's going to be in a smart way.

Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults in their lives.

I never do any album to beat it. I do it to extend it.

I can't stand a ballplayer who plays in fear. Anybody who has a good shot has got to take it and keep taking it. So he misses...so what?

Health is a human right, not a privilege to be purchased.

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive

Do your best and forget the consequences.