Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.

Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!

And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...

When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.

I had never confronted my parents with the true feelings I had for them, and I had certainly never expressed the depth of my feeling for my mother, being too selfish to try when I should have.

His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.

The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering; indeed, they hated it more than ever.

Is the brain, which is notably double in structure, a double organ, 'seeming parted, but yet a union in partition'?

I was reminded of another very special word when I was driving into Ann Arbor this morning, and that word is homecoming. Our family's had three homecomings to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in my lifetime.

The fall [of your soul] from perfection into duality...was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil...This is the Biblical version of a myth known to many lands.

Oh, Lord God, have mercy on me and mend my broken wings.

It's very difficult to say anything in Icelandic. I can say "takk," which means "thank you." That's about all I learned.

Every man is what he is, because of the DOMINATING THOUGHTS which he permits to occupy his mind.

Music is not written in red, white and blue. It is written in the heart's blood of the composer.