To be honest, I wrote so many drafts of this book [ The Nightingale ] and changed the characters so many times; the real surprise is that I finished the book at all.

People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.

Sight is one of the most easily deceived senses. I could make a coin disappear and your eyes would believe it gone, even if it were merely up my sleeve.

You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.

The answers are what they are. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they aren't true.

The only truth was whatever you could make someone believe.

Trying to justify a world we don't hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it's better just to accept that things are as we see them.

Impatient men are generous ones. Or haven't you learned that by now?

All life's a risk, that's what makes it interesting.

Logic only tells us what's there; it can't really address what isn't. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.

It's more cruel to give someone false hope than telling the bitter truth

My dad always says that kindness is our religion and if we treat everybody the way we would like to be treated, the world would be a better place.

We are all nameless inside.

Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb/I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from/Don't even hear a murmur of a prayer/It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

Now that I'm coming out with my own record people can see I'm a solo artist.

Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only so long as it actually circulates.

Everything that occurs in your life is part of God's plan to wake you up.

The safe time to invest is when there is blood in the streets.

the virtue of imagination has this in common with the virtue of courage. Without it, you are less good: with it, you are not necessarily better.

The nature of a democracy consists to an important degree in the right of the people to criticize problems and mistakes.