There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day towards success or failure. But no curses.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

I am only alive because I have not yet died.

This, she realizes, is the basis of all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

What the war did to dreamers.

War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.

What the war did to the dreamers.

Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.

They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet.

Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker’s wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled.

The King of Glory does not reward His servants according to the dignity of their office, but according to the humility and love with which they have exercised it.

There is a German proverb which says that Take-it-Easy and Live-Long are brothers.

I thought comedians had to have black on their faces or red beards.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

I'm politically inclined towards the left, but I don't like to be in anyone's gang; I'm a bit of a loose cannon.

As soon as your dream becomes stronger than your doubts & fears, your dream begins to manifest.

Fortune, by being too lavish of her favours on a man, only makes a fool of him.

While we worry about how fast we grow, God is concerned about how strong we grow.

If there is a perfect book to start the year with it has to be Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch.

Do something bad a thousand times and it's no big deal. Everyone just goes, "Willie f - up again."