Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.

Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.

All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?

It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time

Stop existing and start living!

It ain't no use putting up your umbrella till it rains!

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one's self?

The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.

The rarest feeling that ever lights a human face is the contentment of a loving soul.

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.

Instruction is important.

Twas twilight, and the sunless day went down Over the waste of waters; like a veil, Which, if withdrawn, would but disclose the frown Of one whose hate is mask'd but to assail.

That we arrived at fifty years together is due as much to luck as to love, and a talent for knowing, when we stumble, where to fall, and how to get up again.

Never judge someone By the way he looks Or a book by the way it's covered; For inside those tattered pages, There's a lot to be discovered