The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

For years, I believed that God had been in motion on rare occasions and during biblical times, but I didn't understand that God never stops working on my behalf.

Don’t under-rate the scope of your influence in your youth. Don’t think you have all the time to make a difference in this world. Recognize that both brown and green leaves fall to the ground.

This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.

The scary thing is that sometimes you are wrapping up animation on a sequence and you don't know how the movie ends or begins. You just have to bluff and move forward.

By nature of definition only the coward is capable of the highest heroism

Man's the bad child of the universe

Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes.

Tragically, the White House Task Force on Disadvantaged Youth reported that one-quarter of our young people are at serious risk of not achieving productive adulthood.

I shall be but a shrimp of an author.

I have perceived much beauty In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight; Heard music in the silentness of duty; Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.