We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

The rain to the wind said, You push and I'll pelt.'They so smote the garden bedThat the flowers actually knelt, And lay lodged--though not dead.I know how the flowers felt.

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

In a world like this one, only the random makes sense.

You can be quiet and go back to kissing me, or you can leave.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.

Even in a righteous cause force is a fearful thing.

Philosophy, having crept clinging to the rocks so far, puts out its feelers many ways in vain.

[A.J. Muste] was very influenced - in - influential in the peace movement, in the civil rights movement.

For the first four years, no new enterprise produces profits. Even Mozart didn't start writing music until he was four.

Profitability is where growth takes place.