Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.

We need never be ashamed of our tears.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.

There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.

I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.

It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable, honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world, but it is very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by.

...and to-morrow looked in my face more steadily than I could look at it

So, I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.

Many call this process 'the destruction of nature.' But it's not really destruction, it's change. Nature cannot be destroyed.

The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow.

If I had won...all those other championships, my life might be totally different, but I didn't win. It's not going to affect my life.

All the wrong people are against it, so it must be right.

I've been really lucky that I've been exposed to a lot of lovely, talented people who are not jerks and I would like to continue that streak.

I thought I was so ugly for so long, and I wasted so much of my life on this dumb notion.

What Chavez has done [in Venezuela] is that he has brought extreme poverty to an end.

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.

What's wrong with hip-hop is the system that controls the definition of it. There needs to be more balance on the airwaves.

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.