The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.

You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.

I don't believe in evil; I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.

There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.

There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them.

A giraffe is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plains in long garb, draperies of morning mist her mirage.

Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul.

What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.

Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.

Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution. Be brave, be brave.

The greatest barrier to knowing God’s will is simply that we want to run our own lives. Our problem is that a battle is going on in our hearts—a battle between our wills and God’s will.

It is not good to wake a sleeping lion.

So much pain. So many lives. Their darkness must end.

Culturally, it's very hard to change people's attitudes about public space.

Blessing is the lifeblood throbbing through the universe.

A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.

That's the horrible thing starting out, you get distracted a lot because anything is easier than writing. It's just the same enemy - blank paper.

The reason why education is usually so poor among women of fashion is, that it is not needed for the life which they elect to lead.

That's the way I look at things - if you focus on the worst case scenario and it happens, you've lived it twice. It sounds like Pollyanna-ish tripe but I'm telling you - it works for me.

A single model enables me to focus on one thing at a time, separating design and form and color into three successive stages.