We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Because of the collapsing economy of America, it is nearly a mathematical certainty that this ship will soon flounder.

My eyes fall on you like a singing veil from the days of rebirth.

Break a leg up there, and I'll be down here hopefully breaking someone elses.

Life cannot be captured in a few axioms. And that is just what I keep trying to do. But it won't work, for life is full of endless nuances and cannot be captured in just a few formulae.

Seneca brings vividly before us a picture of the various scholars assembled in a school of the philosophers.

Let your mind become clear like a still forest pool.

If I were an innocent individual, flown to a foreign country and held for several years and tortured, I'd become a terrorist, too. I'd go to war against the U.S.

A Rose is sweeter in the budde than full blowne.

With every physical pain, my moral fibre unravels a little.

Victory is only wrested by running risks.