You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.

The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

This was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again – unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality…

The real troubles with living is that living is so banal.

She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

The greatest strength is the spirit of endurance.

An intrepid person does not fear failure

In my walks I would fain return to my senses.

We find we breathe again, and hear the surgeon hum. Outside, in the street, a car starts up. The heart regularly Thunders.

Buddhists and Taoists of the mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan share the same roots and instructions and have always maintained sound exchanges.

The most beautiful landscapes in the world, if they evoke no memory, if they bear no trace of a remarkable event, are uninteresting compared to historic landscapes.

What peace can they have who are not at peace with God?

There is no jewel in the world so valuable as a chaste and virtuous woman.

I do like characters that have flaws, some sort of pathos to them that they are trying to sort out.

How did the atheist get his idea of that God whom he denies?