the secret of survival was to balance hope and despair

...the face has limited space. My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no more room for crying.

Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder

Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.

Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.

Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

People forget how vulnerable they are despite their shirts and shoes and briefcases, how this hungry and cruel world could strip them, put them in the same position as my beggars.

How starved they seemed for ordinary kindness

The return of solitude was not quite as Dina expected it to be. These many years I made a virtue of inescapable reality, she thought, calling it peace and quiet.

Did life treat everyone so wantonly, ripping the good things to pieces while letting bad things fester and grow like fungus

Where was the line between compassion and foolishness, kindness and weakness? And that was from her position. From theirs, it might be a line between mercy and cruelty, consideration and callousness.

Being truthful is the new beautiful.

We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.

Humour is just another defence against the universe.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

A little tough talk in the midst of a campaign or as part of a presidential debate cannot obscure a record of 30 years of being on the wrong side of defense issues.

In my family, we were Americans, we were Republicans and we were Methodists.

The average man is not hard to mystify.

I never volunteer to talk about god or religion, but people feel compelled to talk about it.

The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.

We can't count on the Fed to inject this level of liquidity that we saw last year.