Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.

Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one's conscience to get in the way.

Even in the darkness, his smile threw shadows.

It was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them.

Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.

Sometimes a thing needed opening before closure was found.

It’s easy to forgo distractions and to not accumulate things when you have a larger goal on the horizon.

I'd rather excite the imagination of a legion of readers and make pennies from each of them than hold off for a larger chunk of change from only a handful of fans.

Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story -- the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.

"What we control," Juliette said, "is our actions once fate puts us there."

My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.

He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable

Stop comparing yourself to others. Always strive to improve yourself to become better today than you were yesterday to serve those around you and the world.

He groaned and murmured, "If I didn't think I was going to die, I'd have you right here.

Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.

In the advanced practice, the relationship between the Zen master and the student becomes very terse. The Zen master will expect things of the student because the student is in graduate school.

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

When we say that the persistence of competition is ensured by fate, we mean that individual freedom is so guaranteed. The one thing to which fate binds us is liberty.

The brain remembers the emotional component of an experience better than any other aspect.

Theory now: concern for truth must not hobble our discussion.

Nothing is like it seems, but everything is exactly like it is.