The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

To survive, you must tell stories.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

The basic success orientation is having an optimistic attitude.

And since He bids me seek His face Believe His word and trust His grace I'll cast on Him my every care And wait for thee sweet hour of prayer.

I'm a health nut, but when I eat, I go hard. I'm a Buffalo wing magnet, a sandwich fanatic, a cheesesteak guy. But I'll only get a cheesesteak in Philadelphia. No one else does it right.

I did not want to leave the Mets and I did not want to leave New York.

Jesus did not promise to change the circumstances around us. He promised great peace and pure joy to those who would learn to believe that God actually controls all things.

People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.

Any man who watches more than three consecutive football games on TV in one day can be declared legally dead.

We live in a constant fear that our shortcomings will be exposed to family, to friends and to the world

Except when he has regressive tendencies, the child's nature is to aim directly and energetically at functional independence.

If we choose to be no more than clods of clay, then we shall be used as clods of clay for braver feet to tread on.