These pictures are my heart. And if my heart was a canvas, every square inch of it would be painted over with you.

There was beauty in the idea of freedom, but it was an illusion. Every human heart was chained by love.

We are bound together, Emma, bound together—I breathe when you breathe, I bleed when you bleed, I’m yours and you’re mine, you’ve always been mine, and I have always, always belonged to you!

The world is terrible, " said Mark tonelessly. "And some are drawn down into it and drown there, and some rise above and carry others with them.

When no one you know tells the truth, you learn to see under the surface.

It was hard to live normally when you were constantly pretending you didn't see what was going on in front of your face.

Why are you wearing a T-shirt under your other T-shirt?" Livvy asked."In case one of them is stolen, " Marked said, as it were entirely normal.

Nobody calls me 'blondie' and keeps their kneecaps.

I've been thinking of installing a train in my house. It could bring me shrimp crackers from the kitchen.

And if my heart was a canvas, every square inch of it would be painted over with you.

Kieran glanced at her with shimmering eyes. Neither looked quite human: The black eye was too dark, the silver too metallic. And yet the overall effect was haunting, inhumanly beautiful.

Make your lives a masterpiece, you only get one canvas.

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.

I always envisioned myself as traveling the ocean of life in a rowboat where my mother was one oar and my father, the other. Having two good, solid oars made rowing much easier.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

College mostly makes people like bladders—just good for nothing but t’ hold the stuff as is poured into ‘em.

The importance to the world of what we scribblers write is in doubt, I would think.

Work and wait, work and wait is what God says to us in creation.

From the point of view of physics, it is a miracle that [seven million New Yorkers are fed each day] without any control mechanism other than sheer capitalism.

One life stamps and influences another, which in turn stamps and influences another, on and on, until the soul of human experience breathes on in generations we'll never meet.

In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.