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

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?

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.

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

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.

bad days makes you stronger, those are the best days because God is talking to you. you just have to listen closely. Don't let your tears become louder than his voice.

Knowing how the environment is pulling your strings and playing you is critical to making responsive rather than reactive moves.

Like any young person, I do what I want.

Defeat is worse than death because you live with defeat.

To be at peace in any endeavour, we must release our need to control the outcome.

Frankly, we doubt the veracity and seriousness of the United States in regard to achieving results that would be acceptable to both sides in Geneva.

Most people would agree that the details matter when it faces the user. But where the real debate is on things that don't face the user.

And I feel that we in our society should not be held by any such myth; that we should do everything we can to gain a delight and joy in our society with all the available parts of the palette.

You can't find what doesn't exist, but you can create it.

All the talent in the world is useless without perseverance.