Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.

The truth doesn't care what we think of it.

No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.

Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.

Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!

The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.

It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.

Get around people who are trying to make a difference in the world. Iron sharpens iron.

A life of devotion to one's passion gives meaning to life.

It all scares me, and it's all like clothes in a dryer that just keep rolling around in my head from one day to the next.

It is the hour when from the boughs The nightingale's high note is heard It is the hour when lovers' vows Seem sweet in every whisper'd word.

There's an underlying puritanicalness in America that is not that different to the prudishness of Britain - it just manifests itself in different ways.

Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution.

My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.

Forget hydrogen, forget hydrogen, forget hydrogen.

It is obvious that mathematics needs both sorts of mathematicians, theory-builders and problem-solvers.