The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.

No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.

If the flame inside you goes out, the souls that are next to you will die of cold.

Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.

That is the mystery of grace: it never comes too late.

Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.

Doubt is nothing but a trivial agitation on the surface of the soul, while deep down there is a calm certainty.

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

There is no accident in our choice of reading. All our sources are related.

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

Men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed-off wings where he never ventures.

Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities an compelling nostalgias.

If you’re dating a writer and they don’t write about you — whether it’s good or bad — then they don’t love you. They just don’t. Writers fall in love with the people we find inspiring.

The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things ... have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.

Here I am a woman attorney being told I can't practice law in slacks by a judge dressed in drag.

Nothing anybody's said or written about me ever bothers me, except when it does.

The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others.

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.

Everything that divides men, everything that separates or herds men together in categories, is a sin against humanity.

It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement.