The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

To befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business & corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

In the seventh century the Arabs created a new world into which other peoples were drawn. In the nineteenth and twentieth, they were themselves drawn into a new world created in western Europe.

I hate smoothies. Because they won't offer Firestone IPA beer as an ingredient.

Had I been crested, not cloven, my Lords, you had not treated me thus.

He is dangerous, he is beautiful, I could drown in his understanding.

People are like that, judging you before they know you.

Average, middle-class people, the people of Macomb County, couldn't afford health care. Now they can [with Obamacare].

When you flop, that's just another message that you don't know how to play me. Stand up and take your medicine like a man.

There's a thousand reasons why I shouldn't drink... but I can't think of one right now.