When you get right down to it, we don’t ever want to know one another too well. We want there to be that mystery. Where there’s mystery, there’s hope.

Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?

Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.

Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.

Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.

Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.

But men are such strange creatures, really. I think most of them would rather we weren’t around at all, so they could just spend time mooning over each other. Hero worship and all that stuff.

The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.

It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.

All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.

The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.

Let the creatures other than man also breathe freely. Remember that earth belongs to all the creatures living in this planet.

Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it's wrong.

It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

I will never vote for Donald Trump.

America is a great story and there is a river on every page of it.

We're all nurtured by mother nature's cycles and seasons.

There is one thing I know for sure. You can become successful, if you are willing to pay the price for success.

I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.

Ill-digested principles are, if anything, worse than ill-digested food, for the latter harms the body and there is cure for it, whereas the former ruins the soul and there is no cure for it.