Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart.

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

I have learned that a man has the right and obligation to look down at another man, only when that man needs help to get up from the ground.

No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.

Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.

Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.

Don't struggle so much, the best things happen when not expected.

If you love something - let. If it is yours - it will come back. I love you not because of who you are, but for who I am when I'm with you.

I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.

Silence is a language in itself. Perhaps the loudest and most beautiful of them all!

To find in ourselves what makes life worth living is risky business for it means that once we know we must seek it. It also means that without it life will be valueless.

Right now, I have to admit, that I'm more interested in giving people a little bit of hope and goodness.

You don't need to buy a $7 billion company to penetrate maritime security. The Mafia doesn't buy FedEx to smuggle.

I love you. You have no idea what you are worth to me.

Discipline is not always internalized and actually can breed resentment among children.

Either way, things are a lot better - either a lot better than they were or a lot better than they're going to be.

It's hard to visualize someone as a leader, if she is always waiting to be told what to do.

We have wide-ranging joint projects in the nuclear energy sphere, logistics, machine building and trade as a whole [with China].