You are eternity's hostage A captive of mine.

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

If you desire many things many things will seem but a few.

We're all in this together - by ourselves.

The monsters in our valley were destroyed that day. Only a very few survived. But that was all right, because we didn't need monsters anymore. We had become them.

I am a Maoist sympathiser. I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism.

I don't like movies that are trying to preach and trying to tell you how to feel.

I could not have done anymore, I had pushed myself to a limit that I had never touched before and that's definitely going to change you - than going out and doing what you do in practice every day.

All geniuses born women are lost to the public good.

High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge.

On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife.

Then my extended family, there are preachers and evangelists, former priests. So I have quite a bit of history with Church, religion and spirituality.