To live is to fight, to preserve life is to fight everything that man stands for.

There's hope at the bottom of the biggest waterfall." ~pg 426

Choices may be unbelievably hard but they're never impossible. To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that's not how a person with integrity acts.

Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.

Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.

To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.

A book… it’s a world all on its own too. A world made of words, where you live for a while.

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.

We are the choices we make.

In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.

... a good idea always attracts other good ideas.

Always recompense kindness with hearty love and gratitude.

A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.

You want a story? Read 'Gone With the Wind'. These aren't stories. They're joke books. The whole thing of a beginning, a middle and an end has been done to death.

Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than [John Singer] Sargent thinks.

I go for all the belles, except the wedding kind.

There is a solitude of space. A solitude of sea. A solitude of death, but these societies shall be compared with that profounder site-that polar privacy. A soul admitted to itself--Finite infinity.

The sick woman especially: no one surpasses her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannising.

Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.

Where it is permissible both to die and not to die, it is an abuse of valour to die.

Success and social promotion are not some right that anybody can claim after queuing at some [government office]. It is better: it is a right, a right that one can merit because of one's sweat.