Ah, books." Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. "They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles.

We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

Knowledge cannot be maintained without character.

I am aware that I am less than some people prefer me to be, but most people are unaware that I am so much more than what they see.

I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces.

For a long time, I'd been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer.

Knavery seems to be so much a the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to this kingdom.

My life may be a pretty crazy life at times, but its a very privileged one - being able to earn a good living doing what you love. Not many people have such an opportunity.

If it's hard, do it hard! Nobody said it would be easy.

I'd rather see twenty thousand smiling faces than twenty thousand crying people.

A little in drink, but at all times your faithful husband.

Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely.