The return of solitude was not quite as Dina expected it to be. These many years I made a virtue of inescapable reality, she thought, calling it peace and quiet.

...the face has limited space. My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no more room for crying.

Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder

Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.

Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.

Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

People forget how vulnerable they are despite their shirts and shoes and briefcases, how this hungry and cruel world could strip them, put them in the same position as my beggars.

How starved they seemed for ordinary kindness

Did life treat everyone so wantonly, ripping the good things to pieces while letting bad things fester and grow like fungus

the secret of survival was to balance hope and despair

Where was the line between compassion and foolishness, kindness and weakness? And that was from her position. From theirs, it might be a line between mercy and cruelty, consideration and callousness.

Reader one moment stop and think, That I am in eternity and you are on the brink.

We've been given the power to have what we visualize, but we tend to visualize what we already have.

Some people seem to be born to suffer.

The songwriting of Hall & Oates is deceptively complex. There are a number of key changes that pass you by as you're listening to the song because they're so seamless and clever.

The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.

We sometimes learn more from the sight of evil than from an example of good; and it is well to accustom ourselves to profit by the evil which is so common, while that which is good is so rare.

Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

I think it's easier than ever to hear only what you want to hear. That doesn't make a good citizen.

Hunger. It's like an animal trapped inside you, Thomas thought.

The law itself follows gold.