This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

On the Day of Judgment, life and death are not determined by the world but by God's wisdom and law

Real is better, The truth is better. Painful but better.

A strong drink can numb the soul as good as any prayer

I'm a nut, but not just a nut.

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

If it wasn't for golf, I'd probably be a caddie today.

Bring the best of your Authentic Self to every opportunity.

Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape

I think it's harder to make a classic now, not because of what people say, but because artists now are so concerned with what people say.

..he understood far more deeply than anyone else the loneliness that lurked beneath his jaunty mask.