But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off.

Of course. You get everything from books.

It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.

There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.

I care as much as I can, but I don’t spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve.

And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations.

Do good though, will you?" She blinked brightly at the green girl. "If not for your parents or your grandmother, then for me?

Don't wish, "said Rain, "don't start. Wishing only...

This is what fun is like, " said Rain, almost to herself.

It’s been a long, rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.

He looked in her eyes as if trying to tell her he loved her without words. She looked back at him as if to say, I know.

Be afraid of a dignified man when he is hungry and a wicked man when his belly is full.

I wasn't quite as certain that I knew her soul. When it came right down to it, I wasn't sure she knew me either.

Those people who wake up and they're just beautiful, they're just born that way. Well that ain't me. I gotta work for everything I've got.

In tactics, action is the governing rule of war.

The magistrate is the servant not of his own desires, not even of the people, but of his God

The most beautiful dream that has haunted the heart of man since Icarus is today reality.

Excuses are tools of the incompetent

I don't want to see that two-tier Senegal, that two-tier Africa, when you have those at the top and those at the bottom, people who are hungry, people who do not have enough to eat.