The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

When all else fails, philosophize.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.

The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love.

It is just as important to bring people the evidence of the beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a document of ugliness, squalor, and despair.

And, well, that's my story," I said. "I'm sorry that it's so, you know. Retarded.

I still can't understand why anyone cares about what I do or what I say.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

In Amsterdam the water is the mistress and the land the vassal. throughout the city there are as many canals and drawbridges as bracelets on a Gypsy's bronzed arms.

For my most of my career I've been a falling-down drunk. Most of my interviews were done hungover, and for a while it was great.

Here lies William Trollope, Who made these stones roll up; When death took his soul up, His body filled this hole up

Nature hath nothing made so base, but can read some instruction to the wisest man.