I simply couldn't walk away from [ The Nightingale].

People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.

Sight is one of the most easily deceived senses. I could make a coin disappear and your eyes would believe it gone, even if it were merely up my sleeve.

You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.

The answers are what they are. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they aren't true.

The only truth was whatever you could make someone believe.

Trying to justify a world we don't hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it's better just to accept that things are as we see them.

Impatient men are generous ones. Or haven't you learned that by now?

All life's a risk, that's what makes it interesting.

Logic only tells us what's there; it can't really address what isn't. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.

Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.

This would have once been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living.

Why are you stripping in my front yard at six in the morning? I have neighbors you know.

It was ... disconcerting to examine your charts before a proposed flight only to find that in many cases the bulk of the terrain over which you had to fly was bluntly marked: 'UNSURV

there are people all over the world who carry the mermaid inside them, that otherworldly beauty and longing and desire that made her reach for heaven when she lived in the darkness of the sea.

Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

I do believe in the infallibility of the Pope, because I think we have to believe in something.

You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.

How many discoveries are reserved for the ages to come when our memory shall be no more, for this world of ours contains matter for investigation for all generations.