The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.

It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.

The heart does not go backward. Only the mind.

When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.

It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.

The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need.

As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.

...History it seemed could be something entirely different a splash of blood whose agony didn't fade overnight or over centuries.

It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.

There is nothing harder, at moments, than talking to someone who has all the power of silence.

...what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?

She had an ability to love that went beyond my ability to grasp the slightest concept of what love was.

The severest test of character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is, when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.

To have the translator be a figure in the book's presentation seems like a big thing, especially for a book that's really popular.

All British castles and old country homes are supposed to be haunted. It's in the lease.

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.

If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.

People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.

The spirit of non-violence necessarily leads to humility. Non-violence means reliance on God, the rock of ages. If we would seek his aid, we must approach Him with a humble and contrite heart.

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.

All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war.