When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.

What reality was ever made by realists?

Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.

It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.

The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.

Sermons seldom convert sinners they sometimes goad them into more sin.

the battle for our culture must be waged at the level of the imagination.

Men, I still think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value.

Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.

No doubt a brain and some shoes are essential for marathon success, although if it comes down to a choice, pick the shoes. More people finish marathons with no brains than with no shoes.

The worst pain in our lives comes from the mistakes we refuse to acknowledge--the things we've done that are so our of harmony with who we are that we can't bear to look at them.

I might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer - if there is any afterlife - to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world.

You might be an interested guy, an interested reported then I get to know you and then I know you're this also and you're this also and you may hide it in a certain way. That's what I love.

Mind alone remains stable, and watches the chaos of phenomena, and knows that there is a plastic unity of existence - a changeless harmony - behind the everchanging.

Akkarin: I watched the first woman I loved die. I dont think I can survive losing the second. Sonea: I love you too.