As it somehow always manages before the winter solstice, but never after, the early darkness was cheerful and promising, even for those who had nothing.

He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.

Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment.

Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.

One is attracted to beauty. Beauty is the coordination of things, in such a way, that it is what attracts you. It's almost self-defining.

The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.

They gave themselves up to the stars the way swimmers can surrender to the waves, and the stars took them without resistance.

And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold.

If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.

Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor.

And how does God speak to you?" "In the language of everything that is beautiful.

Grit, which they defined as the tendency to work strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.

When you open to the world, the world opens to you.

Meanwhile, our young men and women whose economic circumstances make military service a viable career choice are dying bravely in a war with no end in sight.

Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.

Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

(The AMA is) "just another mean trust."

More than 3,500 hardcover novels are published each year. Even the most avid reader buys fewer than one a week.

No matter what the problem, a miracle can solve it. Remember to ask for one.

It doesn't take the most powerful nations on Earth to create the next global conflict. Just the will of a single man.