The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.

This world is good enough for me, if only I can be good enough for it.

Liberal hopefulness Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture.

Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

Poetry contains nothing haphazard.

The heart of standing is that you cannot fly.

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves; Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems; Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.

Proust has listed a great many reasons why it is impossible to be happy, but, in the course of being happy, one finds it difficult to remember them.

The difficult part of good temper consists in forbearance, and accommodation to the ill-humors of others.

Madness and chaos are self-destructing but over thinking is the suicide.

The sure way to succeed Is to endure to the very end.

The God you worship will shape the values you hold, and the values you hold will shape the lifestyle that you choose.

I have a preference for rough architecture, real, inexpensive, unfinished.

The universe is contained within us, and what we experience externally is only a reflection.

My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books.

Education is wonderful - it helps you worry about things all over the world.

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold.

I'm afraid a boat so small would sink with the weight of all my sorrow.

Optimism is America's birthright.... There is no social problem Americans dare not attack. No problem, that is, except one: about marriage, and marriage alone, we despair.